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STUDIES     OF     CHILDHOOD 


ABERDEEN    UNIVERSITY   PRESS. 


STUDIES  OF  CHILDHOOD 


JAMES     SULLY,    M.A.,    L  L.tt 

GROTE  PROFESSOR  OK  PHILOSOPHY  OK  MIND  ANB  LOGIC,  UNIVERSITY  COLI.KGK 
LONDON;   AUTHOR  OK  "OUTLINES  OF  PSYCHOLOGY,"  KTC. 


NEW  EDITION 


LONDON 
LONGMANS,     GREEN,     AND     CO. 

1896 


CORRIGENDA  AND  ADDENDA. 

P.  3,  lines  17  and  18  — 

For  "  Ich  schaue  dich  an,"  etc.,  read 

"  Ich  schau'  dich  an,  und  Wehmuth 

Schleicht  mir  ins  Herz  hi-riein  ". 

Pp.    5    and    526,  for  "  Dr.    Lionel    Robinson,"   read   "  Dr.    Louis 
Robinson  ". 

P.  27,  footnote,  for  ;4  P.  Queyrot,"  read  '•  F.  Queyrat ". 
P.  34,  footnote  i,  after  Princeton  Review,  insert: — 

'•  New  series,  1883.     Cf.  the  same  writer's  volume,  TJie  Con- 
tents of  Children's  Minds  on  entering  School,  1893." 
P.  79,  line  5,  for  '  stones,'  read  '  stars '. 
P.  90,  line  7,  for  '  a  few,'  read  '  few  '. 
P.  222.  line  9,  for  '  elder,'  read  '  older  '. 

P.  334,  Fig.  i  (a)  and  (b\  the  long  line  of  the  body  should  be  placed 
vertically,  not  horizontally. 

Pp-  331,  336,  33«>  345,  348>  352,  355.  359,  371,  372,  379,  for  "Von 
Steinen,"  read  "Von  den  Steinen  ". 


PREFACE. 

THE  following  Studies  are  not  a  complete  treatise 
on  child-psychology,  but  merely  deal  with  certain 
aspects  of  children's  minds  which  happen  to  have 
come  under  my  notice,  and  to  have  had  a  special 
interest  for  me.  In  preparing  them  I  have  tried  to 
combine  with  the  needed  measure  of  exactness  a 
manner  of  presentation  which  should  attract  other 
readers  than  students  of  psychology,  more  particu- 
larly parents  and  young  teachers. 

A  part  of  these  Studies  has  already  appeared 
elsewhere.  The  Introductory  Chapter  was  published 
in  the  Fortnightly  Review  for  November,  1895. 
The  substance  of  those  from  II.  to  VIII.  has  been 
printed  in  the  Popiilar  Science  Monthly  of  New 
York.  Portions  of  the  "  Extracts  from  a  Father's 
Diary  "  appeared  jn  the  form  of  two  essays,  one  on 
"  Babies  and  Science  "  in  the  Cornhill  Magazine  in 
1 88 1,  and  the  other  on  "Baby  Linguistics"  in  the 
English  Illustrated  Magazine  in  1884.  The  original 
form  of  these,  involving  a  certain  disguise — though 
hardly  one  of  impenetrable  thickness — has  been 
retained.  The  greater  part  of  the  study  on 
"  George  Sand's  Childhood  "  was  published  as  two 
articles  in  Longmans  Magazine  in  1889  and  1890. 

Like  all  others   who   have   recently   worked  at 


VI  PREFACE. 

child-psychology  I  am  much  indebted  to  the 
pioneers  in  the  field,  more  particularly  to  Professor 
W.  Preyer.  In  addition  to  these  I  wish  to  express 
my  obligations  to  my  colleague,  Dr.  Postgate,  of 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  -for  kindly  reading 
through  my  essay  on  children's  language,  and 
giving  me  many  valuable  suggestions ;  to  Lieutenant- 
General  Pitt- Rivers,  F.R.S.,  and  Mr.  H.  Balfour, 
of  the  Museum,  Oxford,  for  the  friendly  help 
they  rendered  me  in  studying  the  drawings  of 
savages,  and  to  Mr.  E.  Cooke  for  many  valuable 
facts  and  suggestions  bearing  on  children's  modes 
of  drawing.  Lastly,  I  would  tender  my  warm 
acknowledgments  to  the  parents  who  have  sent  me 
notes  on  their  children's  mental  development.  To 
some  few  of  these  sets  of  observations,  drawn  up 
with  admirable  care,  I  feel  peculiarly  indebted,  for 
without  them  I  should  probably  not  have  written 
my  book. 

.  -     J.  s. 

HAMPSTEAD, 
November,   1895. 


CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

I.  INTRODUCTORY,  i 

II.  THE  AGE  OF  IMAGINATION, 25 

Why  we  call  Children  Imaginative,     -         -         -         -  25 

Imaginative  Transformation  of  Objects,      -  28 

Imagination  and  Play,                                                        -  35 

Free  Projection  of  Fancies,  51 
Imagination  and  Storyland,         -         -         -         -         -54 

III.  THE  DAWN  OF  REASON,    -                                                     -  64 

The  Process  of  Thought,     ------  64 

The  Questioning  Age,                                                -         -  75 

IV.  PRODUCTS  OF  CHILD-THOUGHT, 91 

The  Child's  Thoughts  about  Nature,  91 

Psychological  Ideas,                                                           -  109 

Theological  Ideas,       - 120 

V.  THE  LITTLE  LINGUIST,    -        -        -        -        -        -        -  133 

Prelinguistic  Babblings,       -                                     -         -  133 

Transition  to  Articulate  Speech,                                      -  138 

Beginnings  of  Linguistic  Imitation,    -  147 

Transformations  of  our  Words,  -                                     -  148 

Logical  Side  of  Children's  Language,          r         -         -  160 

Sentence-building,       ...                                     .  170 

Getting  at  our  Meanings,    -                                              -  183 

VI.  SUBJECT  TO  FEAR,    -        -                                            -        -  191 

Children's  Sensibility,                                               •         -  191 

Startling  Effect  of  Sounds,  -                                    -         -  194 

Fear  of  Visible  Things,        -                                     -         -  198 

The  Fear  of  Animals,                            ....  207 

Fear  of  the  Dark,                                              -        -         -  211 

Fears  and  their  Palliatives,                  ....  219 

VII.  RAW  MATERIAL  OF  MORALITY,                   ....  228 

Primitive  Egoism,        -                                              -         -  228 

Germs  of  Altruism, 242 

Children's  Lies,  ....                          .  251 


viii  CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

VIII.  UNDER  LAW,  267 

The  Struggle  with  Law,       -  267 

On  the  Side  of  Law,    -  277 

The  Wise  Law-giver,  -  290 

IX.  THE  CHILD  AS  ARTIST,     -  298 

First  Responses  to  Natural  Beauty,  -                           -     3°° 

Early  Attitude  towards  Art,         -  3°7 

Beginnings  of  Art-production,     -  •         -         -     31? 

X.  THE  YOUNG  DRAUGHTSMAN,      -  -     331 

First  Attempts  to  Draw,      -  33 l 

First  Drawings  of  the  Human  Figure,  -     335 

Front  and  Side  View  of  Human  Figure,       -  -     35° 

First  Drawings  of  Animals,  -     372 

Men  on  Horseback,  etc.,      -  -                       377 

R6sume  of  Facts,  382 

Explanation  of  Facts,  -         -  385 

XI.  EXTRACTS  FROM  A  FATHER'S  DIARY,  399 

First  Year,  -        -  4°° 

Second  Year,        -         -  -     4ID 

Third  Year,  43& 

Fourth  Year,       -  452 

Fifth  Year,  -  4°4 

Sixth  Year,  -     48° 

XII.  GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD,    -  -     489 

The  First  Years,  -  489 

A  Self-evolved  Religion,      -  -     5°6 

Bibliography,      -         -  5T5 

Index, 519 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

i. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

MAN  has  always  had  the  child  with  him,  and  one  might  be 
sure  that  since  he  became  gentle  and  alive  to  the  beauty  of 
things  he  must  have  come  under  the  spell  of  the  baby. 
We  have  evidence  beyond  the  oft-quoted  departure  of 
Hector  and  other  pictures  of  childish  grace  in  early  literature 
that  baby-worship  and  baby-subjection  are  not  wholly 
things  of  modern  times.  There  is  a  pretty  story  taken 
down  by  Mr.  Leland  from  the  lips  of  an  old  Indian  woman, 
which  relates  how  Glooskap  the  hero-god,  after  conquering 
all  his  enemies,  rashly  tried  his  hand  at  managing  a  certain 
mighty  baby,  Wasis  by  name,  and  how  he  got  punished  for 
his  rashness. l 

Yet  there  is  good  reason  to  suppose  that  it  is  only 
within  comparatively  recent  times  that  the  more  subtle 
charm  and  the  deeper  significance  of  infancy  have  been 
discerned.  We  have  come  to  appreciate  babyhood  as 
we  have  come  to  appreciate  the  finer  lineaments  of  nature 
as  a  whole.  This  applies,  of  course,  more  especially  to  the 
ruder  sex.  The  man  has  in  him  much  of  the  boy's  con- 
tempt for  small  things,  and  he  needed  ages  of  education 
at  the  hands  of  the  better-informed  woman  before  he  could 
perceive  the  charm  of  infantile  ways. 

One  of  the  first  males  to  do  justice  to  this  attractive 
subject  was  Rousseau.  He  made  short  work  of  the 
theological  dogma  that  the  child  is  born  morally  depraved, 

1  Quoted  by  Miss  Shinn.     Overland  Monthly.     January,  1894. 

I 


2  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

and  can  only  be  made  good  by  miraculous  appliances. 
His  watchword,  return  to  nature,  included  a  reversion  to  the 
infant  as  coming  virginal  and  unspoilt  by  man's  tinkering 
from  the  hands  of  its  Maker.  To  gain  a  glimpse  of  this 
primordial  beauty  before  it  was  marred  by  man's  awkward 
touch  was  something,  and  so  Rousseau  set  men  in  the  way 
of  sitting  reverently  at  the  feet  of  infancy,  watching  and 
learning. 

For  us  of  to-day,  who  have  learned  to  go  to  the  pure 
springs  of  nature  for  much  of  our  spiritual  refreshment,  the 
child  has  acquired  a  high  place  among  the  things  of  beauty. 
Indeed,  the  grace  of  childhood  may  almost  be  said  to  have 
been  discovered  by  the  modern  poet.  Wordsworth  has 
stooped  over  his  cradle  intent  on  catching,  ere  they  passed, 
the  '  visionary  gleams '  of  '  the  glories  he  hath  known '. 
Blake,  R.  L.  Stevenson,  and  others,  have  tried  to  put  into 
language  his  day-dreamings,  his  quaint  fancyings.  Dickens 
and  Victor  Hugo  have  shown  us  something  of  his  delicate 
quivering  heart-strings  ;  Swinburne  has  summed  up  the 
divine  charm  of  "  children's  ways  and  wiles  ".  The  page 
of  modern  literature  is,  indeed,  a  monument  of  our  child- 
love  and  our  child-admiration. 

Nor  is  it  merely  as  to  a  pure  untarnished  nature  that 
we  go  back  admiringly  to  childhood.  The  aesthetic  charm 
of  the  infant  which  draws  us  so  potently  to  its  side  and 
compels  us  to  watch  its  words  and  actions  is,  like  every- 
thing else  which  moves  the  modern  mind,  highly  complex. 
Among  other  sources  of  this  charm  we  may  discern  the 
perfect  serenity,  the  happy  '  insouciance'  of  the  childish 
mind.  The  note  of  world-complaint  in  modern  life  has 
penetrated  into  most  domains,  yet  it  has  not,  one  would 
hope,  penetrated  into  the  charmed  circle  of  childish  experi- 
ence. Childhood  has,  no  doubt,  its  sad  aspect : — 

Poor  stumbler  on  the  rocky  coast  of  woe, 
Tutored  by  pain  each  source  of  pain  to  know : 


INTRODUCTION.  3 

neglect  and  cruelty  may  bring  much  misery  into  the  first 
bright  years.  Yet  the  very  instinct  of  childhood  to  be  glad 
in  its  self-created  world,  an  instinct  which  with  consum- 
mate art  Victor  Hugo  keeps  warm  and  quick  in  the  breast 
of  the  half-starved  ill-used  child  Cosette,  secures  for  it 
a  peculiar  blessedness.  The  true  nature-child,  who  has  not 
become  blase,  is  happy,  untroubled  with  the  future,  knowing 
nothing  of  the  misery  of  disillusion.  As,  with  hearts 
chastened  by  many  experiences,  we  take  a  peep  over  the 
wall  of  his  fancy-built  pleasaunce,  we  seem  to  be  taken  back 
to  a  real  golden  age.  With  Amiel,  we  say :  "  Le  peu  de 
paradis  que  nous  apergevons  encore  sur  la  terre  est  du  a  sa 
presence ".  Yet  the  thought,  which  the  same  moment 
brings,  of  the  flitting  of  the  nursery  visions,  of  the  coming 
storm  and  stress,  adds  a  pathos  to  the  spectacle,  and  we 
feel  as  Heine  felt  when  he  wrote  : — 

Ich  schaue  dich  an  und  Wehmuth 

Schleicht  mir  in's  Herz  hinein. 

Other  and  strangely  unlike  feelings  mingle  with  this 
caressing,  half-pitiful  admiration.  We  moderns  are  given 
to  relieving  the  strained  attitude  of  reverence  and  pity  by 
momentary  outbursts  of  humorous  merriment.  The  child, 
whjje  appealing  to  our  admiration  and  our  pity,  makes  a 
large  and  many-voiced  appeal  also  to  our  sense  of  the 
laughter  in  things.  It  is  indeed  hard  to  say  whether  he  is 
most  amusing  when  setting  at  naught  in  his  quiet,  lordly 
way,  our  most  extolled  views,  our  ideas  of  the  true  and 
the  false,  of  the  proper  uses  of  things,  and  so  forth,  or  when 
labouring  in  his  perfectly  self-conceived  fashion  to  overtake 
us  and  be  as  experienced  and  as  conventional  as  ourselves. 
This  ever  new  play  of  droll  feature  in  childish  thought  and 
action  forms  one  of  the  deepest  sources  of  delight  for  the 
modern  lover  of  childhood. 

With  the  growth  of  a  poetic  or  sentimental  interest  in 
childhood  there  has  come  a  new  and  different  kind  of 
interest.  Ours  is  a  scientific  age,  and  science  has  cast  its 


4  STUDIES   OF    CHILDHOOD. 

inquisitive  eye  on  the  infant.  We  want  to  know  what 
happens  in  these  first  all-decisive  two  or  three  years  of 
human  life,  by  what  steps  exactly  the  wee  amorphous  thing- 
takes  shape  and  bulk,  both  physically  and  mentally.  And 
we  can  now  speak  of  the  beginning  of  a  careful  and 
methodical  investigation  of  child-nature,  by  men  trained  in 
scientific  observation.  This  line  of  inquiry,  started  by 
physicians,  as  the  German  Sigismund,  in  connection  with 
their  special  professional  aims,  has  been  carried  on  by  a. 
number  of  fathers  and  others  having  access  to  the  infant, 
among  whom  it  may  be  enough  to  name  Darwin  and 
Preyer.1 

This  eagerness  to  know  what  the  child  is  like,  an  eager- 
ness illustrated  further  by  the  number  of  reminiscences  of 
early  years  recently  published,  is  the  outcome  of  a  many- 
sided  interest  which  it  may  be  worth  while  to  analyse. 

The  most  obvious  source  of  interest  in  the  doings  of 
infancy  lies  in  its  primitiveness.  At  the  cradle  we  are 
watching  the  beginnings  of  things,  the  first  tentative  thrust- 
ings  forward  into  life.  Our  modern  science  is  before  all 
things  historical  and  genetic,  going  back  to  beginnings  so- 
as  to  understand  the  later  and  more  complex  phases  of 
things  as  the  outcome  of  these  beginnings.  The  same  kind 
of  curiosity  which  prompts  the  geologist  to  get  back  to  the 
first  stages  in  the  building  up  of  the  planet,  or  the  biologist 
to  search  out  the  pristine  forms  of  life,  is  beginning  to  urge 
the  student  of  man  to  discover  by  a  careful  study  of  infancy 
the  way  in  which  human  life  begins  to  take  its  characteristic 
forms. 

The  appearance  of  Darwin's  name  among  those  who 
have  deemed  the  child  worthy  of  study  suggests  that  the 
subject  is  closely  connected  with  natural  history.  However 
man  in  his  proud  maturity  may  be  related  to  nature,  it  is 
certain  that  in  his  humble  inception  he  is  immersed  in 

1  A  fuller  list  of  writings  on  the  subject  will  be  given  at  the  end  of 
the  volume. 


INTRODUCTION.  5 

Tier  and  saturated  with  her.  As  we  all  know,  the  lowest 
races  of  mankind  stand  in  close  proximity  to  the  animal 
world.  The  same  is  true  of  the  infants  of  civilised  races. 
Their  life  is  outward  and  visible,  forming  a  part  of  nature's 
spectacle  ;  reason  and  will,  the  noble  prerogatives  of  human- 
ity, are  scarce  discernible  ;  sense,  appetite,  instinct,  these 
animal  functions  seem  to  sum  up  the  first  year  of  human 
life. 

To  the  evolutionist,  moreover,  the  infant  exhibits  a  still 
closer  kinship  to  the  natural  world.  In  the  successive 
stages  of  foetal  development  he  sees  the  gradual  unfolding 
of  human  lineaments  out  of  a  widely  typical  animal  form. 
And  even  after  birth  he  can  discern  new  evidences  of  this 
genealogical  relation  of  the  "  lord "  of  creation  to  his 
inferiors.  How  significant,  for  example,  is  the  fact  re- 
cently established  by  a  medical  man,  Dr.  Lionel  Robin- 
son, that  the  new-born  infant  is  able  just  like  the  ape  to 
suspend  his  whole  weight  by  grasping  a  small  horizontal 
rod.  ' 

Yet  even  as  nature-object  for  the  biologist  the  child 
presents  distinctive  attributes.  Though  sharing  in  animal 
instinct,  he  shares  in  it  only  to  a  very  small  extent.  The 
most  striking  characteristic  of  the  new-born  offspring  of 
man  is  its  unpreparedness  for  life.  Compare  with  the 
young  of  other  animals  the  infant  so  feeble  and  incapable. 
He  can  neither  use  his  limbs  nor  see  the  distance  of  objects 
•as  a  new-born  chick  or  calf  is  able  to  do.  His  brain- 
centres  are,  we  are  told,  in  a  pitiable  state  of  undevelopment 
— and  are  not  even  securely  encased  within  their  bony 
•covering.  Indeed,  he  resembles  for  all  the  world  a  public 
building  which  has  to  be  opened  by  a  given  date,  and  is 
found  when  the  day  arrives  to  be  in  a  humiliating  state  of 
in  completeness. 

1  The  Nineteenth  Century  (1891).  Cf.  the  somewhat  fantastic  and 
not  too  serious  paper  by  S.  S.  Buckman  on  "  Babies  and  Monkeys  " 
in  the  same  journal  (1894). 


6  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

This  fact  of  the  special  helplessness  of  the  human 
offspring  at  birth,  of  its  long  period  of  dependence  on 
parental  or  other  aids — a  period  which,  probably,  tends  to 
grow  longer  as  civilisation  advances — is  rich  in  biological 
and  sociological  significance.  For  one  thing,  it  presupposes 
a  specially  high  development  of  the  protective  and  foster- 
ing instincts  in  the  human  parents,  and  particularly  the 
mother — for  if  the  helpless  wee  thing  were  not  met  by  these 
instincts,  what  would  become  of  our  race  ?  It  is  probable, 
too,  as  Mr.  Spencer  and  others  have  argued,  that  the 
institution  by  nature  of  this  condition  of  infantile  weakness 
has  reacted  on  the  social  affections  of  the  race,  helping  to 
develop  our  pitifulness  for  all  frail  and  helpless  things. 

Nor  is  this  all.  The  existence  of  the  infant,  with  its 
large  and  imperative  claims,  has  been  a  fact  of  capital 
importance  in  the  development  of  social  customs.  Ethno- 
logical researches  show  that  communities  have  been  much 
exercised  with  the  problem  of  infancy,  have  paid  it  the 
homage  due  to  its  supreme  sacredness,  girding  it  about 
with  a  whole  group  of  protective  and  beneficent  customs.1 

Enough  has  been  said,  perhaps,  to  show  the  far-reaching 
significance  of  babyhood  to  the  modern  savant.  It  is 
hardly  too  much  to  say  that  it  has  become  one  of  the  most 
eloquent  of  nature's  phenomena,  telling  us  at  once  of  our 
affinity  to  the  animal  world,  and  of  the  forces  by  which  our 
race  has,  little  by  little,  lifted  itself  to  so  exalted  a  position 
above  this  world  ;  and  so  it  has  happened  that  not  merely 
to  the  perennial  baby-worshipper,  the  mother,  and  not 
merely  to  the  poet  touched  with  the  mystery  of  far-off 
things,  but  to  the  grave  man  of  science  the  infant  has 
become  a  centre  of  lively  interest. 

Nevertheless,  it  is  not  to  the  mere  naturalist  that  the 
babe  reveals  all  its  significance.  Physical  organism  as  it 
seems  to  be  more  than  anything  else,  hardly  more  than  a 

1  See,  for  example,  the  works  of  H.  Ploss,  Das  Kind  in  Branch 
und  Sitte,  and  Deis  kleine  Kind. 


INTRODUCTION.  7 

vegetative  thing  indeed,  it  carries  with  it  the  germ  of  a 
human  consciousness,  and  this  consciousness  begins  to 
expand  and  to  form  itself  into  a  truly  human  shape  from 
the  very  beginning.  And  here  a  new  source  of  interest 
presents  itself.  It  is  the  human  psychologist,  the  student 
of  those  impalpable,  unseizable,  evanescent  phenomena 
which  we  call  "  state  of  consciousness,"  who  has  a  supreme 
interest,  and  a  scientific  property  in  these  first  years  of  a 
human  existence.  What  is  of  most  account  in  these  crude 
tentatives  at  living  after  the  human  fashion  is  the  play  of 
mind,  the  first  spontaneous  manifestations  of  recognition,  of 
reasoning  expectation,  of  feelings  of  sympathy  and  anti- 
pathy, of  definite  persistent  purpose. 

Rude,  inchoate,  vague  enough,  no  doubt,  are  these  first 
groping  movements  of  a  human  mind  :  yet  of  supreme 
value  to  the  psychologist  just  because  they  are  the  first. 
If,  reflects  the  psychologist,  he  can  only  get  at  this  baby's 
consciousness  so  as  to  understand  what  is  passing  there,  he 
will  be  in  an  infinitely  better  position  to  find  his  way 
through  the  intricacies  of  the  adult  consciousness.  It  may 
be,  as  we  shall  see  by-and-by,  that  the  baby's  mind  is  not 
so  perfectly  simple,  so  absolutely  primitive  as  it  at  first 
looks.  Yet  it  is  the  simplest  type  of  human  consciousness 
to  which  we  can  have  access.  The  investigator  of  this 
consciousness  can  never  take  any  known  sample  of  the 
animal  mind  as  his  starting  point  if  for  no  other  reason 
for  this,  that  while  possessing  many  of  the  elements  of  the 
human  mind,  it  presents  these  in  so  unlike,  so  peculiar  a 
pattern. 

In  this  genetic  tracing  back  of  the  complexities  of 
man's  mental  life  to  their  primitive  elements  in  the  child's 
consciousness,  questions  of  peculiar  interest  will  arise.  A 
problem,  which  though  having  a  venerable  antiquity  is 
still  full  of  meaning,  concerns  the  precise  relation  of  the 
higher  forms  of  intelligence  and  of  sentiment  to  the 
elementary  facts  of  the  individual's  life-experience.  Are 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

we  to  regard  all  our  ideas,  even  those  of  God,  as  woven  by 
the  mind  out  of  its  experiences,  as  Locke  thought,  or  have 
we  certain  '  innate  ideas  '  from  the  first  ?  Locke  thought 
he  could  settle  this  point  by  observing  children.  To-day, 
when  the  philosophic  emphasis  is  laid  not  on  the  date  of 
appearance  of  the  '  innate  '  intuition,  but  on  its  originality 
and  spontaneity,  this  method  of  interrogating  the  child's 
mind  may  seem  less  promising.  Yet  if  of  less  philosophical 
importance  than  was  once  supposed,  it  is  of  great 
psychological  importance.  There  are  certain  questions, 
such  as  that  of  how  we  come  to  see  things  at  a  distance 
from  us,  which  can  be  approached  most  advantageously  by 
a  study  of  infant  movements.  In  like  manner  I  believe  the 
growth  of  a  moral  sentiment,  of  that  feeling  of  reverence 
for  duty  to  which  Kant  gave  so  eloquent  an  expression, 
can  only  be  understood  by  the  most  painstaking  observa- 
tion of  the  mental  activities  of  the  first  years. 

There  is,  however,  another,  and  in  a  sense  a  larger,  source 
of  psychological  interest  in  studying  the  processes  and  de- 
velopment of  the  infant  mind.  It  was  pointed  out  above 
that  to  the  evolutional  biologist  the  child  exhibits  man  in 
his  kinship  to  the  lower  sentient  world.  This  same 
evolutional  point  of  view  enables  the  psychologist  to  con- 
nect the  unfolding  of  an  infant's  mind  with  something  which 
has  gone  before,  with  the  mental  history  of  the  race.  Ac- 
cording to  this  way  of  looking  at  infancy  the  successive 
phases  of  its  mental  life  are  a  brief  resume  of  the  more  im- 
portant features  in  the  slow  upward  progress  of  the  species. 
The  periods  dominated  successively  by  sense  and  appetite,  by 
blind  wondering  and  superstitious  fancy,  and  by  a  calmer 
observation  and  a  juster  reasoning  about  things,  these  steps 
mark  the  pathway  both  of  the  child-mind  and  of  the  race- 
mind. 

This  being  so,  the  first  years  of  a  child,  with  their  im- 
perfect verbal  expression,  their  crude  fanciful  ideas,  their 
seizures  by  rage  and  terror,  their  absorption  in  the  present 


INTRODUCTION.  9 

moment,  acquire  a  new  and  antiquarian  interest.  They 
mirror  for  us,  in  a  diminished  distorted  reflexion  no  doubt, 
the  probable  condition  of  primitive  man.  As  Sir  John  Lub- 
bock  and  other  anthropologists  have  told  us,  the  intellectual 
and  moral  resemblances  between  the  lowest  existing  races 
of  mankind  and  children  are  numerous  and  close.  They  will 
be  illustrated  again  and  again  in  the  following  studies. 

Yet  this  way  of  viewing  childhood  is  not  merely  of 
antiquarian  interest.  While  a  monument  of  his  race,  and 
in  a  manner  a  key  to  its  history,  the  child  is  also  its  product. 
In  spite  of  the  fashionable  Weismannism  of  the  hour,  there 
are  evolutionists  who  hold  that  in  the  early  manifested  ten- 
dencies of  the  child  we  can  discern  signs  of  a  hereditary 
transmission  of  the  effects  of  ancestral  experiences  and  activi- 
ties. His  first  manifestations  of  rage,  for  example,  are  a 
survival  of  actions  of  remote  ancestors  in  their  life  and  death 
struggles.  The  impulse  of  obedience,  which  is  as  much  a 
characteristic  of  the  child  as  that  of  disobedience,  may  in  like 
manner  be  regarded  as  a  transmitted  rudiment  of  a  long 
practised  action  of  socialised  ancestors.  This  idea  of  an  in- 
crement of  intelligence  and  moral  disposition,  earned  for  the 
individual  not  by  himself  but  by  his  ancestors,  has  its 
peculiar  interest.  It  gives  a  new  meaning  to  human  pro- 
gress to  suppose  that  the  dawn  of  infant  intelligence,  instead 
of  being  a  return  to  a  primitive  darkness,  contains  from  the 
first  a  faint  light  reflected  on  it  from  the  lamp  of  racial  in- 
telligence which  has  preceded  ;  that  instead  of  a  return  to  the 
race's  starting  point,  the  lowest  form  of  the  school  of  experi- 
ence, it  is  a  start  in  a  higher  form,  the  promotion  being  a 
reward  conferred  on  the  child  for  the  exertions  of  his 
ancestors.  Psychological  observation  will  be  well  employed 
in  scanning  the  features  of  the  infant's  mind  in  order  to  see 
whether  they  yield  evidence  of  such  ancestral  dowering. 

So  much  with  respect  to  the  rich  and  varied  scientific 
interest  attaching  to  the  movements  of  the  child's  mind.  It 
only  remains  to  touch  on  a  third  main  interest  in  childhood, 


10  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  practical  or  educational  interest.  The  modern  world, 
while  erecting  the  child  into  an  object  of  aesthetic  contem- 
plation, while  bringing  to  bear  on  him  the  bull's  eye  lamp 
of  scientific  observation,  has  become  sorely  troubled  by  the 
momentous  problem  of  rearing  him.  What  was  once  a 
matter  of  instinct  and  unthinking  rule-of-thumb  has  become 
the  subject  of  profound  and  perplexing  discussion.  Mothers 
— the  right  sort  of  mothers  that  is — feel  that  they  must  know 
au  fond  this  wee  speechless  creature  which  they  are  called 
upon  to  direct  into  the  safe  road  to  manhood.  And  profes- 
sional teachers,  more  particularly  the  beginners  in  the  work 
of  training,  whose  work  is  in  some  respects  the  most  difficult 
and  the  most  honourable,  have  come  to  see  that  a  clear  in- 
sight into  child-nature  and  its  spontaneous  movements  must 
precede  any  intelligent  attempt  to  work  beneficially  upon 
this  nature.  In  this  way  the  teacher  has  lent  his  support  to 
the  savant  and  the  psychologist  in  their  investigation  of 
infancy.  More  particularly  he  has  betaken  him  to  the 
psychologist  in  order  to  discover  more  of  the  native  tenden- 
cies and  the  governing  laws  of  that  unformed  child-mind 
which  it  is  his  in  a  special  manner  to  form.  In  addition  to 
this,  the  growing  educational  interest  in  the  spontaneous 
behaviour  of  the  child's  mind  may  be  expected  to  issue  in  a 
demand  for  a  statistic  of  childhood,  that  is  to  say,  carefully 
arranged  collections  of  observations  bearing  on  such  points 
as  children's  questions,  their  first  thoughts  about  nature, 
their  manifestations  of  sensibility  and  insensibility. 

The  awakening  in  the  modern  mind  of  this  keen  and 
varied  interest  in  childhood  has  led,  and  is  destined  to  lead 
still  more,  to  the  observation  of  infantile  ways.  This  observa- 
tion will,  of  course,  be  of  very  different  value  according  as 
it  subserves  the  contemplation  of  the  humorous  or  other 
aesthetically  valuable  aspect  of  child-nature,  or  as  it  is 
directed  towards  a  scientific  understanding  of  this.  Pretty 
anecdotes  of  children  which  tickle  the  emotions  may  or 
may  not  add  to  our  insight  into  the  peculiar  mechanism  of 


INTRODUCTION.  I  I 

children's  minds.  There  is  no  necessary  connexion  between 
smiling  at  infantile  drolleries  and  understanding  the  laws  of 
infantile  intelligence.  Indeed,  the  mood  of  merriment,  if 
too  exuberant,  will  pretty  certainly  swamp  for  the  moment 
any  desire  to  understand. 

The  observation  which  is  to  further  understanding, 
which  is  to  be  acceptable  to  science,  must  itself  be  scientific. 
That  is  to  say,  it  must  be  at  once  guided  by  fore- 
knowledge, specially  directed  to  what  is  essential  in  a 
phenomenon  and  its  surroundings  or  conditions,  and 
perfectly  exact.  If  anybody  supposes  this  to  be  easy,  he 
should  first  try  his  hand  at  the  work,  and  then  compare 
what  he  has  seen  with  what  Darwin  or  Preyer  has  been 
able  to  discover. 

How  difficult  this  is  may  be  seen  even  with  reference 
to  the  outward  physical  part  of  the  phenomena  to  be 
observed.  Ask  any  mother  untrained  in  observation  to 
note  the  first  appearance  of  that  complex  facial  movement 
which  we  call  a  smile,  and  you  know  what  kind  of  result 
you  are  likely  to  get.  The  phenomena  of  a  child's  mental 
life,  even  on  its  physical  and  visible  side,  are  of  so  subtle 
and  fugitive  a  character  that  only  a  fine  and  quick 
observation  is  able  to  cope  with  them.  But  observation  of 
children  is  never  merely  seeing.  Even  the  smile  has  to  be 
interpreted  as  a  smile  by  a  process  of  imaginative  inference. 
Many  careless  onlookers  would  say  that  a  baby  smiles  in  the 
first  days  from  very  happiness,  when  another  and  simpler 
explanation  of  the  movement  is  forthcoming.  Similarly, 
it  wants  much  fine  judgment  to  say  whether  an  infant  is 
merely  stumbling  accidentally  on  an  articulate  sound,  or  is 
imitating  your  sound.  A  glance  at  some  of  the  best 
memoirs  will  show  how  enormously  difficult  it  is  to  be  sure 
of  a  right  interpretation  of  these  early  and  comparatively 
simple  manifestations  of  mind. l 

1  These  difficulties  seem  to  me  to  be  curiously  overlooked  in 
Prof.  Mark  Baldwin's  recent  utterance  on  child  psychology  (Mental 


12  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

Things  grow  a  great  deal  worse  when  we  try  to  throw 
our  scientific  lassoo  about  the  elusive  spirit  of  a  child  of 
four  or  six,  and  to  catch  the  exact  meaning  of  its  swiftly 
changing  movements.  Children  are,  no  doubt,  at  this  age 
frank  before  the  eye  of  love,  and  their  minds  are  vastly 
more  accessible  than  that  of  the  dumb  dog  that  can  only 
look  his  ardent  thoughts.  Yet  they  are  by  no  means  so 
open  to  view  as  is  often  supposed.  All  kinds  of  shy 
reticences  hamper  them  :  they  feel  unskilled  in  using  our 
cumbrous  language  ;  they  soon  find  out  that  their  thoughts 
are  not  as  ours,  but  often  make  us  laugh.  And  how 
carefully  are  they  wont  to  hide  from  our  sight  their 
nameless  terrors,  physical  and  moral.  Much  of  the  deeper 
childish  experience  can  only  reach  us,  if  at  all,  years  after 
it  is  over,  through  the  faulty  medium  of  adult  memory — 
faulty  even  when  it  is  the  memory  of  a  Goethe,  a  George 
Sand,  a  Robert  Louis  Stevenson. l 

Even  when  there  is  perfect  candour,  and  the  little  one 
does  his  best  to  instruct  us  as  to  what  is  passing  in  his  mind 
by  his  '  whys '  and  his  '  I  s'poses,'  accompanied  by  the  most 
eloquent  of  looks,  we  find  ourselves  ever  and  again  unequal 
to  comprehending.  Child-thought  follows  its  own  paths — 
roads,  as  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling  has  well  said,  "  unknown  to 
those  who  have  left  childhood  behind  ".  The  dark  sayings 
of  childhood,  as  when  a  child  asks,  '  Why  am  I  not  some- 
body else  ?  '  will  be  fully  illustrated  below. 

This  being  so,  it  might  well  seem  arrogant  to  speak  of 

Development  in  the  Child  and  the  Race,  chap.  ii.).  In  this  optimistic 
presentment  of  the  subject  there  is  not  the  slightest  reference  to  the 
difficult  work  of  interpretation.  Child-study  is  talked  of  as  a 
perfectly  simple  mode  of  observation,  requiring  at  most  to  be  supple- 
mented by  a  little  experiment,  and,  it  may  be  added,  backed  by  a 
firm  theory. 

1  In  these  days  of  published  reminiscences  of  childhood  it  is 
quite  refreshing  to  meet  with  a  book  like  Mr.  James  Payn's  Gleams 
of  Memory,  which  honestly  confesses  that  its  early  recollections  are 
almost  nil. 


INTRODUCTION.  13 

any  '  scientific  '  investigation  of  the  child's  mind  ;  and,  to 
be  candid,  I  may  as  well  confess  that,  in  spite  of  some 
recently  published  highly  hopeful  forecasts  of  what  child- 
psychology  is  going  to  do  for  us,  I  think  we  are  a  long  way 
off  from  a  perfectly  scientific  account  of  it.  Our  so-called 
theories  of  children's  mental  activity  have  so  often  been 
hasty  generalisations  from  imperfect  observations.  Children 
are  probably  much  more  diverse  in  their  ways  of  thinking 
and  feeling  than  our  theories  suppose.  But  of  this  more 
presently.  Even  where  we  meet  with  a  common  and 
comparatively  prominent  trait,  we  are  far  as  yet  from 
having  a  perfect  comprehension  of  it.  I  at  least  believe 
that  children's  play,  about  which  so  much  has  confidently 
been  written,  is  but  imperfectly  understood.  Is  it  serious 
business,  half-conscious  make-believe,  more  than  half-con- 
scious acting,  or,  no  one  of  these,  or  all  of  them  by  turns  ? 
I  think  he  would  be  a  bold  man  who  ventured  to  answer 
this  question  straight  away. 

In  this  state  of  things  it  might  seem  well  to  wait. 
Possibly  by-and-by  we  shall  light  on  new  methods  of 
tapping  the  childish  consciousness.  Patients  in  a  certain 
stage  of  the  hypnotic  trance  have  returned,  it  is  said,  to 
their  childish  experiences  and  feelings.  Some  people  do 
this,  or  appear  to  do  this,  in  their  dreams.  I  know  a 
young  man  who  revives  vivid  recollections  of  the  expe- 
riences of  the  third  year  of  life  when  he  is  sleepy,  and 
more  especially  if  he  is  suffering  from  a  cold.  These  facts 
suggest  that  if  we  only  knew  more  about  the  mode  of 
working  of  the  brain  we  might  reinstate  a  special  group  of 
conditions  which  would  secure  a  re-emergence  of  childish 
ideas  and  sentiments. 

Yet  our  case  is  not  so  hopeless  that  we  need  defer 
inquiry  into  the  child's  mind  until  human  science  has 
fathomed  all  the  mysteries  of  the  brain.  We  can  know 
many  things  of  this  mind,  and  these  of  great  impor- 
tance, even  now.  The  naturalist  discusses  the  actions 


14  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

of  the  lower  animals,  confidently  attributing  intelligent 
planning  here,  and  a  germ  of  vanity  or  even  of  moral  sense 
there  ;  and  it  would  be  hard  were  we  forbidden  to  study 
the  little  people  that  are  of  our  own  race,  and  are  a 
thousand  times  more  open  to  inspection.  Really  good 
work  has  already  been  done  here,  and  one  should  be 
grateful.  At  the  same  time,  it  seems  to  me  of  the  greatest 
importance  to  recognise  that  it  is  but  a  beginning  :  that 
the  child  which  the  modern  world  has  in  the  main  dis- 
covered is  after  all  only  half  discovered  :  that  if  we  are  to 
get  at  his  inner  life,  his  playful  conceits,  his  solemn  brood- 
ings  over  the  mysteries  of  things,  his  way  of  responding  to 
the  motley  show  of  life,  we  must  carry  this  work  of  noting 
and  interpreting  to  a  much  higher  point. 

Now,  if  progress  is  to  be  made  in  this  work,  we  must 
have  specially  qualified  workers.  All  who  know  anything 
of  the  gross  misunderstandings  of  children  of  which  many 
so-called  intelligent  adults  are  capable,  will  bear  me  out 
when  I  say  that  a  certain  gift  of  penetration  is  absolutely 
indispensable  here.  If  any  one  asks  me  what  the  qualifica- 
tions of  a  good  child-observer  amount  to,  I  may  perhaps 
answer,  for  the  sake  of  brevity,  '  a  divining  faculty,  the 
offspring  of  child-love,  perfected  by  scientific  training  '. 
Let  us  see  what  this  includes. 

That  the  observer  of  children  must  be  a  diviner,  a  sort 
of  clairvoyant  reader  of  their  secret  thoughts,  seems  to  me 
perfectly  obvious.  Watch  half  a  dozen  men  who  find 
themselves  unexpectedly  ushered  into  a  room  tenanted  by 
a  small  child,  and  you  will  soon  be  able  to  distinguish 
the  diviners,  who,  just  because  they  have  in  themselves 
something  akin  to  the  child,  seem  able  at  once  to  get 
into  touch  with  children.  It  is  probable  that  women's 
acknowledged  superiority  in  knowledge  of  child-nature  is 
owing  to  their  higher  gift  of  sympathetic  insight.  This 
faculty,  so  far  from  being  purely  intellectual,  is  very  largely 
the  outgrowth  of  a  peculiar  moral  nature  to  which  the  life 


INTRODUCTION.  15 

of  all  small  things,  and  of  children  more  than  all,  is  always 
sweet  and  congenial.  It  is  very  much  of  a  secondary,  or 
acquired  instinct  ;  that  is,  an  unreflecting  intuition  which 
is  the  outgrowth  of  a  large  experience.  For  the  child-lover 
seeks  the  object  of  his  love,  and  is  never  so  happy  as 
when  associating  with  children  and  sharing  in  their 
thoughts  and  their  pleasures.  And  it  is  through  such 
habitual  intercourse  that  there  forms  itself  the  instinct  or 
tact  by  which  the  significance  of  childish  manifestation  is 
at  once  unerringly  discerned. 

There  is  in  this  tact  or  fineness  of  spiritual  touch  one 
constituent  so  important  as  to  deserve  special  mention.  I 
mean  a  lively  memory  of  one's  own  childhood.  As  I  have 
observed  above,  I  do  not  believe  in  an  exact  and  trust- 
worthy reproduction  in  later  life  of  particular  incidents  of 
childhood.  All  recalling  of  past  experiences  illustrates  the 
modifying  influence  of  the  later  self  in  its  attempt  to  as- 
similateand  understand  the  earlierself;  and  this  transforming 
effect  is  at  its  maximum  when  we  try  to  get  back  to  child- 
hood. But  though  our  memory  of  childhood  is  not  in 
itself  exact  enough  to  furnish  facts,  it  may  be  sufficiently 
strong  for  the  purposes  of  interpreting  our  observations  of 
the  children  we  see  about  us.  It  is  said,  and  said  rightly, 
that  in  order  to  read  a  child's  mind  \ve  need  imagination, 
and  since  all  imagination  is  merely  readjustment  of 
individual  experience,  it  follows  that  the  skilled  decipherer 
of  infantile  characters  needs  before  all  things  to  be  in  touch 
with  his  own  early  feelings  and  thoughts.  And  this  is  just 
what  we  find.  The  vivacious,  genial  woman  who  is  never 
so  much  at  home  as  when  surrounded  by  a  bevy  of  eager- 
minded  children  is  a  woman  who  remains  young  in  the 
important  sense  that  she  retains  much  of  the  freshness  and 
unconventionally  of  mind,  much  of  the  gaiety  and  ex- 
pansiveness  of  early  life.  Conversely  one  may  feel  pretty 
sure  that  a  woman  who  retains  a  vivid  memory  of  her 
childish  ideas  and  feelings  will  be  drawn  to  the  companion- 


l6  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

ship  of  children.  After  reading  their  autobiographies  one 
hardly  needs  to  be  told  that  Goethe  carried  into  old  age  his 
quick  responsiveness  to  the  gaiety  of  the  young  heart  ;  and 
that  George  Sand  when  grown  old  was  never  so  happy  as 
when  gathering  the  youngsters  about  her.  l 

Yet  valuable  as  is  this  gift  of  sympathetic  insight,  it  will 
not,  of  course,  conduce  to  that  methodical,  exact  kind  of 
observation  which  is  required  by  science.  Hence  the  need 
of  the  second  qualification  :  psychological  training.  By 
this  is  meant  that  special  knowledge  which  comes  from 
studying  the  principles  of  the  science,  its  peculiar  problems, 
and  the  methods  appropriate  to  these,  together  with  the 
special  skill  which  is  attained  by  a  methodical,  practical 
application  of  this  knowledge  in  the  actual  observation  and 
interpretation  of  manifestations  of  mind.  Thus  a  woman 
who  wishes  to  observe  to  good  effect  the  mind  of  a  child  of 
three  must  have  a  sufficient  acquaintance  with  the  general 
course  of  the  mental  life  to  know  what  to  expect,  and  in 
what  way  the  phenomena  observed  have  to  be  interpreted. 
Really  fine  and  fruitful  observation  is  the  outcome  of  a 
large  knowledge,  and  anybody  who  is  to  carry  out  in  a 
scientific  fashion  the  observation  of  the  humblest  phase  of 
a  child's  mental  life  must  already  know  this  life  as  a 
whole,  so  far  as  psychology  can  as  yet  describe  its  character- 
istics, and  determine  the  conditions  of  its  activity. 

And  here  the  question  naturally  arises  :  "  Who  is  to 
carry  out  this  new  line  of  scientific  observation  ? "  To 
begin  with  the  first  stage  of  it,  who  is  to  carry  out  the  exact 
methodical  record  of  the  movements  of  the  infant  ?  It  is 
evident  that  qualification  or  capacity  is  not  all  that  is 
necessary  here;  capacity  must  be  favoured  with  opportunity 
before  the  work  can  be  actually  begun. 

It  has  been  pointed  out  that  the  pioneers  who  struck  out 

1  Since  this  was  written  the  authoress  of  Little  Lord  Fauntleroy 
has  shown  us  how  clear  and  far-reaching  a  memory  she  has  of  her 
childish  experiences. 


INTRODUCTION.  \J 

this  new  line  of  experimental  research  were  medical  men. 
The  meaning  of  this  fact  is  pretty  apparent.  The  doctor 
has  not  only  a  turn  for  scientific  observation  ;  he  is  a 
privileged  person  in  the  nursery.  The  natural  guardians  of 
infancy,  the  mother  and  the  nurse,  exempt  him  from  their 
general  ban  on  the  male.  He  excepted,  no  man,  not  even 
the  child's  own  father,  is  allowed  to  meddle  too  much  with 
that  divine  mystery,  that  meeting  point  of  all  the  graces 
and  all  the  beatitudes,  the  infant. 

Consider  for  a  moment  the  natural  prejudice  which  the 
inquirer  into  the  characteristics  of  the  infant  has  to  face. 
Such  inquiry  is  not  merely  passively  watching  what 
spontaneously  presents  itself;  it  is  emphatically  experi- 
menting, that  is,  the  calling  out  of  reactions  by  applying 
appropriate  stimuli.  Even  to  try  whether  the  new-born 
babe  will  close  its  fingers  on  your  finger  when  brought  into 
contact  with  their  anterior  surface  may  well  seem  impious 
to  a  properly  constituted  nurse.  To  propose  to  test  the  wee 
creature's  sense  of  taste  by  applying  drops  of  various 
solutions,  as  acid,  bitters,  etc.,  to  the  tongue,  or  to  provoke 
ocular  movements  to  the  right  or  the  left,  would  pretty 
certainly  seem  a  profanation  of  the  temple  of  infancy,  if  not 
fraught  with  danger  to  its  tiny  deity.  And  as  to  trying 
Dr.  Robinson's  experiment  of  getting  the  newly  arrived 
visitor  to  suspend  his  whole  precious  weight  by  clasping 
a  bar,  it  is  pretty  certain  that,  women  being  constituted  as 
at  present,  only  a  medical  man  could  have  dreamt  of  so 
daring  a  feat. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  baby-worship,  the  sentimental 
adoration  of  infant  ways,  is  highly  inimical  to  the  carrying 
out  of  a  perfectly  cool  and  impartial  process  of  scientific 
observation.  Hence  the  average  mother  can  hardly  be 
expected  to  do  more  than  barely  to  tolerate  this  encroach- 
ing of  experiment  into  the  hallowed  retreat  of  the  nursery. 
Even  in  these  days  of  rapid  modification  of  what  used  to 
be  thought  unalterable  sexual  characters,  one  may  be  bold 

2 


1 8  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

enough  to  hazard  the  prophecy  that  women  who  have  had 
scientific  training  will,  if  they  happen  to  become  mothers, 
hardly  be  disposed  to  give  their  minds  at  the  very  outset  to 
the  rather  complex  and  difficult  work,  say,  of  making  an 
accurate  scientific  inventory  of  the  several  modes  of  infantile 
sensibility,  visual,  auditory,  and  so  forth,  and  of  the 
alterations  in  these  from  day  to  day. 

It  is  for  the  coarser  fibred  man,  then,  to  undertake  much 
of  the  earlier  experimental  work  in  the  investigation  of 
child-nature.  And  if  fathers  will  duly  qualify  themselves 
they  will  probably  find  that  permission  will  little  by  little 
be  given  them  to  carry  out  investigations,  short,  of  course, 
of  anything  that  looks  distinctly  dangerous  to  the  little 
being's  comfort. 

At  the  same  time  it  is  evident  that  a  complete  series  of 
observations  of  the  infant  can  hardly  be  carried  out  by  a 
man  alone.  It  is  for  the  mother,  or  some  other  woman 
with  a  pass-key  to  the  nursery,  with  her  frequent  and  pro- 
longed opportunities  of  observation,  to  attempt  a  careful  and 
methodical  register  of  mental  progress.  Hence  the  im- 
portance of  enlisting  the  mother  or  her  female  representa- 
tive as  collaborates  or  at  least  as  assistant.  Thus  sup- 
posing the  father  is  bent  on  ascertaining  the  exact  dates 
and  the  order  of  appearance  of  the  different  articulate 
sounds,  which  is  rather  a  subject  of  passive  observation 
than  of  active  experiment ;  he  will  be  almost  compelled 
to  call  in  the  aid  of  one  who  has  the  considerable  advantage 
of  passing  a  good  part  of  each  day  near  the  child.1 

1  The  great  advantage  which  the  female  observer  of  the  infant's 
mind  has  over  her  male  competitor  is  clearly  illustrated  in  some 
recent  studies  of  childhood  by  American  women.  I  would  especially 
call  attention  to  a  study  by  Miss  M.  W.  Shinn  of  the  University  of 
California,  Notes  on  the  Development  of  a  Child  (the  writer's  niece),  where 
the  minute  and  painstaking  record  (e.g.,  of  the  child's  colour — dis- 
crimination and  visual  space-exploration)  points  to  the  ample 
opportunity  of  observation  which  comes  more  readily  to  women. 


INTRODUCTION.  ig 

As  the  wee  thing  grows  and  its  nervous  system  becomes 
more  stable  and  robust  more  in  the  way  of  research  may  of 
course  be  safely  attempted.  In  this  higher  stage  the  work 
•of  observation  will  be  less  simple  and  involve  more  of 
special  psychological  knowledge.  It  is  a  comparatively 
-easy  thing  to  say  whether  the  sudden  approach  of  an  object 
to  the  eye  of  a  baby  a  week  or  so  old  calls  forth  the  reflex 
known  as  blinking :  it  is  a  much  more  difficult  thing  to  say 
what  are  the  preferences  of  a  child  of  twelve  months  in  the 
matter  of  simple  forms,  or  even  colours. 

The  problem  of  the  course  of  development  of  the  colour- 
i?ense  in  children  looks  at  first  easy  enough.  Any  mother, 
it  may  be  thought,  can  say  which  colours  the  child  first 
recognises  by  naming  them  when  seen,  or  picking  them  out 
when  another  names  them.  Yet  simple  as  it  looks,  the 
problem  is  in  reality  anything  but  simple.  A  German 
investigator,  Professor  Preyer  of  Berlin,  went  to  work 
methodically  with  his  little  boy  of  two  years  so  as  to 
see  in  what  order  he  would  discriminate  colours.  Two 
colours,  red  and  green,  were  first  shown,  the  name  added 
to  each,  and  the  child  then  asksd :  "  Which  is  red  ? " 
"  Which  is  green  ?  "  Then  other  colours  were  added  and  the 
experiments  repeated.  According  to  these  researches  this 
particular  child  first  acquired  a  clear  discriminative  aware- 
ness of  yellow.  Preyer's  results  have  not,  however,  been 
confirmed  by  other  investigators,  as  M.  Binet  of  Paris,  who 
followed  a  similar  method  of  inquiry.  Thus  according  to 
Binet  it  is  not  yellow  but  blue  which  carries  the  day  in  the 
competition  for  the  child's  preferential  recognition. 

What,  it  may  be  asked,  is  the  explanation  of  this  ?  Is 
it  that  children  differ  in  the  mode  of  development  of  their 
colour-sensibility  to  this  extent,  or  can  it  be  that  there  is 
some  fault  in  the  method  of  investigation  ?  It  has  been 
recently  suggested  that  the  mode  of  testing  colour-dis- 
crimination by  naming  is  open  to  the  objection  that  a  child 
may  get  hold  of  one  verbal  sound  as  '  red  '  more  easily 


20  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

than  another  as  '  green '  and  that  this  would  facilitate  the- 
recognition  of  the  former.  If  in  this  way  the  recognition 
of  a  colour  is  aided  by  the  retention  of  its  name,  we 
must  get  rid  of  this  disturbing  element  of  sound.  Accord- 
ingly new  methods  of  experiment  have  been  attempted  in 
France  and  America.  Thus  Professor  Baldwin  investigates 
the  matter  by  placing  two  colours  opposite  the  child's  two- 
arms  and  noting  which  is  reached  out  to  by  right  or  left 
arm,  which  is  ignored.  He  has  tabulated  the  results  of  a 
short  series  of  these  simple  experiments  for  testing  child- 
ish preference,  and  supports  the  conclusions  of  Binet,  as 
against  those  of  Preyer,  that  blue  comes  in  for  the  first 
place  in  the  child's  discriminative  recognition.1  It  is  how- 
ever easy  to  see  that  this  method  has  its  own  characteristic 
defects.  Thus,  to  begin  with,  it  evidently  does  not  directly- 
test  colour-discrimination  at  all,  but  the  liking  for  or  in- 
terest in  colours,  which  though  it  undoubtedly  implies  a 
measure  of  discrimination  must  not  be  confused  with  this. 
And  even  as  a  test  of  preference  it  is  very  likely  to  be  mis- 
applied. Thus  supposing  that  the  two  colours  are  not 
equally  bright,  then  the  child  will  grasp  at  one  rather  than 
at  the  other,  because  it  is  a  brighter  object  and  not  because 
it  is  this  particular  colour.  Again  if  one  colour  fall  more 
into  the  first  and  fresh  period  of  the  exercise  when  the 
child  is  fresh  and  active,  whereas  another  falls  more  into 
the  second  period  when  he  is  tired  and  inactive,  the  results 
would,  it  is  evident,  give  too  much  value  to  the  former. 
Similarly,  if  one  colour  were  brought  in  after  longer  inter- 
vals of  time  than  another  it  would  have  more  attractive 
force  through  its  greater  novelty. 

Enough  has  been  said  to  show  how  very  delicate  a 
problem  we  have  here  to  deal  with.  And  if  scientific  men 
are  still  busy  settling  the  point  how  the  problem  can 
be  best  dealt  with,  it  seems  hopeless  for  the  amateur  to. 
dabble  in  the  matter. 

1  Mental  Development  in  the  Child  and  the  Race,  chap.  iii. 


INTRODUCTION.  21 

I  have  purposely  chosen  a  problem  of  peculiar  com- 
plexity and  delicacy  in  order  to  illustrate  the  importance 
of  that  training  which  makes  the  mental  eye  of  the  observer 
quick  to  analyse  the  phenomenon  to  be  dealt  with  so  as  to 
take  in  all  its  conditions.  Yet  there  are  many  parts  of  this 
work  of  observing  the  child's  mind  which  do  not  make  so 
heavy  a  demand  on  technical  ability,  but  can  be  done  by 
any  intelligent  observer  prepared  for  the  task  by  a  reason- 
able amount  of  psychological  study.  I  refer  more  particu- 
larly to  that  rich  and  highly  interesting  field  of  exploration 
which  opens  up  when  the  child  begins  to  talk.  It  is  in  the 
spontaneous  utterances  of  children,  their  first  quaint  uses  of 
words,  that  we  can  best  watch  the  play  of  the  instinctive 
tendencies  of  thought.  Children's  talk  is  always  valuable 
to  a  psychologist ;  and  for  my  part  I  would  be  glad 
•of  as  many  anecdotal  records  of  their  sayings  as  I  could 
•collect. 

Here,  then,  there  seems  to  be  room  for  a  relatively 
simple  and  unskilled  kind  of  observing  work.  Yet  it  would 
be  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  even  this  branch  of  child- 
•observation  requires  nothing  but  ordinary  intelligence. 
To  begin  with,  we  are  all  prone,  till  by  special  training 
we  have  learned  to  check  the  inclination,  to  read  far  too 
much  of  our  older  thought  and  sentiment  into  children. 
As  M.  Droz  observes,  nous  soinmes  dupes  de  nous-mcmes 
lorsque  nous  observons  ces  chers  bajiibins.1 

Again,  there  is  a  subtle  source  of  error  connected 
with  the  very  attitude  of  undergoing  examination  which 
only  a  carefully  trained  observer  of  childish  ways  will  avoid. 
A  child  is  very  quick  in  spying  whether  he  is  being  ob- 
served, and  as  soon  as  he  suspects  that  you  are  specially 
interested  in  his  talk  he  is  apt  to  try  to  produce  an  effect. 
This  wish  to  say  something  startling,  wonderful,  or  what 
not,  will,  it  is  obvious,  detract  from  the  value  of  the  utter- 
ance. 

1  L' Enfant,  p.  14 2. 


22  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

But  once  more  the  saying  which  it  is  so  easy  to  report 
has  had  its  history,  and  the  observer  who  knows  something 
of  psychology  will  look  out  for  facts,  that  is  to  say,  experi- 
ences of  the  child,  suggestions  made  by  others'  words  which 
throw  light  on  the  saying.  No  fact  is  really  quite  simple,, 
and  the  reason  why  some  facts  look  so  simple  is  that  the 
observer  does  not  include  in  his  view  all  the  connexions 
of  the  occurrence  which  he  is  inspecting.  The  unskilled 
observer  of  children  is  apt  to  send  scraps,  fragments  of  facts, 
which  have  not  their  natural  setting.  The  value  of  psycho- 
logical training  is  that  it  makes  one  as  jealously  mindful  of 
wholeness  in  facts  as  a  housewife  of  wholeness  in  her  porce- 
lain. It  is,  indeed,  only  when  the  whole  fact  is  before  us, 
in  well-defined  contour,  that  we  can  begin  to  deal  with  its 
meaning.  Thus  although  those  ignorant  of  psychology  may 
assist  us  in  this  region  of  fact-finding,  they  can  never  ac- 
complish that  completer  and  exacter  kind  of  observation' 
which  we  dignify  by  the  name  of  Science.1 

One  may  conclude  then  that  women  are  fitted  to  be- 
come valuable  labourers  in  this  new  field  of  investigation, 
if  only  they  will  acquire  a  genuine  scientific  interest  in 
babyhood,  and  a  fair  amount  of  scientific  training.  That  a. 
large  number  of  women  will  get  so  far  is  I  think  doubtful: 
the  sentimental  or  aesthetic  attraction  of  the  baby  is  apt  to- 
be  a  serious  obstacle  to  a  cold  matter-of-fact  examination 
of  it  as  a  scientific  specimen.  The  natural  delight  of  a 
mother  in  every  new  exhibition  of  infantile  wisdom  or 
prowess  is  liable  to  blind  her  to  the  exceedingly  modest 

1  Since  writing  the  above  I  have  had  my  opinion  strongly  con- 
firmed by  reading  a  record  of  sayings  of  children  carried  out  by 
women  students  in  an  American  Normal  College  (Thoughts  and 
Reasonings  of  Children,  classified  by  H.  W.  Brown,  Teacher  of 
Psychology  in  State  Normal  School,Worcester,  Mass.,  with  introduc- 
tion by  E.  H.  Russell,  Principal :  reprinted  from  the  Pedagogical  Semin- 
ary). Many  of  the  quaint  sayings  noted  down  lose  much  of  their 
psychological  point  from  our  complete  ignorance  of  the  child's  home- 
experience,  companionships,  school  and  training. 


INTRODUCTION.  23 

significance  of  the  child's  performances  as  seen  from  the 
scientific  point  of  view.  Yet,  as  I  have  hinted,  this  very 
fondness  for  infantile  ways,  may,  if  only  the  scientific 
caution  is  added,  prove  a  valuable  excitant  to  study.  In 
England,  and  in  America,  there  is  already  a  considerable 
number  of  women  who  have  undergone  some  serious  train- 
ing in  psychology,  and  it  may  not  be  too  much  to  hope 
that  before  long  we  shall  have  a  band  of  mothers  and  aunts 
busily  engaged  in  noting  and  recording  the  movements 
of  children's  minds. 

I  have  assumed  here  that  what  is  wanted  is  careful 
studies  of  individual  children  as  they  may  be  approached 
in  the  nursery.  And  these  records  of  individual  children, 
after  the  pattern  of  Preyer's  monograph,  are,  I  think,  our 
greatest  need.  We  are  wont  to  talk  rather  too  glibly  about 
that  abstraction,  'the  child,'  as  if  all  children  rigorously 
corresponded  to  one  pattern,  of  which  pattern  we  have  a 
perfect  knowledge.  Mothers  at  least  know  that  this  is 
not  so.  Children  of  the  same  family  will  be  found  to 
differ  very  widely  (within  the  comparatively  narrow  field  of 
childish  traits),  as,  for  example,  in  respect  of  matter-of-fact- 
ness,  of  fanci fulness,  of  inquisitiveness.  Thus,  while  it  is 
probably  true  that  most  children  at  a  certain  age  are 
greedy  of  the  pleasures  of  the  imagination,  Nature  in  her 
well-known  dislike  of  monotony  has  taken  care  to  make  a 
few  decidedly  unimaginative.  We  need  to  know  much 
more  about  these  variations :  and  what  will  best  help  us 
here  is  a  number  of  careful  records  of  infant  progress, 
embracing  examples  not  only  of  different  sexes  and 
temperaments,  but  also  of  different  social  conditions  and 
nationalities.  When  we  have  such  a  collection  of  mono- 
graphs we  shall  be  in  a  much  better  position  to  fill  out  the 
hazy  outline  of  our  abstract  conception  of  childhood  with 
definite  and  characteristic  lineaments. 

At  the  same  time  I  gladly  allow  that  other  modes  of 
observation  are  possible  and  in  their  way  useful.  This 


24  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

applies  to  older  children  who  pass  into  the  collective  exist- 
ence of  the  school-class.  Here  something  like  collective 
or  statistical  inquiry  may  be  begun,  as  that  into  the 
contents  of  children's  minds,  their  ignorances  and  misappre- 
hensions of  common  objects.  Some  part  of  this  inquiry 
into  the  minds  of  school-children  may  very  well  be  under- 
taken by  an  intelligent  teacher.  Thus  it  would  be  valuable 
to  have  careful  records  of  children's  progress  carried  out  by 
pre-arranged  tests,  so  as  to  get  collections  of  examples  of 
mental  activity  at  different  ages.  More  special  lines  of 
inquiry  having  a  truly  experimental  character  might  be 
carried  out  by  experts,  as  those  already  begun  with  refer- 
ence to  children's  "span  of  apprehension,"  i.e.,  the  number  of 
digits  or  nonsense  syllables  that  can  be  reproduced  after  a 
single  hearing,  investigations  into  the  effects  of  fatigue  on 
mental  processes,  into  the  effect  of  number  of  repetitions 
on  the  certainty  of  reproduction,  into  musical  sensitive- 
ness and  so  forth. 

Valuable  as  such  statistical  investigation  undoubtedly 
is,  it  is  no  substitute  for  the  careful  methodical  study  of  the 
individual  child.  This  seems  to  me  the  greatest  desidera- 
tum just  now.  Since  the  teacher  needs  for  practical  reasons 
to  make  a  careful  study  of  individuals  he  might  well  assist 
here.  In  these  days  of  literary  collaboration  it  might  not 
be  amiss  for  a  kindergarten  teacher  to  write  an  account  of 
a  child's  mind  in  co-operation  with  the  mother.  Such  a 
record  if  well  done  would  be  of  the  greatest  value.  The 
co-operation  of  the  mother  seems  to  me  quite  indispensable, 
since  even  where  there  is  out-of-class  intercourse  between 
teacher  and  pupil  the  knowledge  acquired  by  the  former 
never  equals  that  of  the  mother. 


II. 

THE  AGE  OF  IMAGINATION. 
Why  we  call  Children  Imaginative. 

ONE  of  the  few  things  we  seemed  to  be  certain  of  with 
respect  to  child-nature  was  that  it  is  fancy-full.  Childhood, 
we  all  know,  is  the  age  for  dreaming,  for  decking  out  the 
world  as  yet  unknown  with  the  gay  colours  of  imagination  ; 
for  living  a  life  of  play  or  happy  make-believe.  So  that 
nothing  seems  more  to  characterise  the  '  Childhood  of  the 
World  '  than  the  myth-making  impulse  which  by  an  over- 
flow of  fancy  seeks  to  hide  the  meagreness  of  knowledge. 

Yet  even  here,  perhaps,  we  have  been  content  with  loose 
generalisation  in  place  of  careful  observation  and  analysis 
of  facts.  For  one  thing,  the  play  of  infantile  imagination 
is  probably  much  less  uniform  than  is  often  supposed. 
There  seem  to  be  matter-of-fact  children  who  cannot  rise 
buoyantly  to  a  bright  fancy.  Mr.  Ruskin,  of  all  men,  has 
recently  told  us  that  when  a  child  he  was  incapable  of 
acting  a  part  or  telling  a  tale,  that  he  never  knew  a  child 
"whose  thirst  for  visible  fact  was  at  once  so  eager  and  so 
methodic  'V  We  may  accept  the  report  of  Mr.  Ruskin's 
memory  as  proving  that  he  did  not  idle  away  his  time  in 
day-dreams,  but,  by  long  and  close  observation  of  running 
water,  and  the  like,  laid  the  foundations  of  that  fine  know- 
ledge of  the  appearances  of  nature  which  everywhere  shines 
through  his  writings.  Yet  one  may  be  permitted  to  doubt 

1  Prcsterita,  p.  76. 


26  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

whether  a  writer  who  shows  not  only  so  rich  and  graceful  a 
style  but  so  truly  poetic  an  invention  could  have  been  in 
every  respect  an  unimaginative  child. 

Perhaps  the  truth  will  turn  out  to  be  the  paradox  that 
most  children  are  at  once  matter-of-fact  observers  and 
dreamers,  passing  from  the  one  to  the  other  as  the  mood 
takes  them,  and  with  a  facility  which  grown  people  may 
well  envy.  My  own  observations  go  to  show  that  the 
prodigal  out-put  of  fancy,  the  revelling  in  myth  and  story, 
is  often  characteristic  of  one  period  of  childhood  only. 
We  are  apt  to  lump  together  such  different  levels  of  experi- 
ence and  capacity  under  that  abstraction  '  the  child  '.  The 
wee  mite  of  three  and  a  half,  spending  more  than  half  his 
days  in  trying  to  realise  all  manner  of  pretty,  odd,  startling 
fancies  about  animals,  fairies,  and  the  rest,  is  something 
vastly  unlike  the  boy  of  six  or  seven,  whose  mind  is  now 
bent  on  understanding  the  make  and  go  of  machines,  and 
of  that  big  machine,  the  world. 

So  far  as  I  can  gather  from  inquiries  sent  to  parents  and 
other  observers  of  children,  a  large  majority  of  boys  and 
girls  alike  are  for  a  time  fancy-bound.  A  child  that  did 
not  want  to  play  and  cared  nothing  for  the  marvels  of 
story-land  would  surely  be  regarded  as  queer  and  not  just 
what  a  child  ought  to  be.  Yet,  supposing  that  this  is  the 
right  view,  there  still  remains  the  question  whether  imag- 
ination always  works  in  the  same  way  in  the  childish 
brain.  Science  is  beginning  to  aid  us  in  understanding  the 
differences  of  childish  fancy.  For  one  thing  it  is  leading 
us  to  see  that  a  child's  whole  imaginative  life  may  be 
specially  coloured  by  the  preponderant  vividness  of  a  certain 
order  of  images,  that  one  child  may  live  imaginatively  in 
a  coloured  world,  another  in  a  world  of  sounds,  another 
rather  in  a  world  of  movements.  It  is  easy  to  note  in  the 
case  of  certain  children  of  the  more  lively  and  active  turn,. 
how  the  supreme  interest  of  story  as  of  play  lies  in  the 
ample  range  of  movement  and  bodily  activity.  Robinson 


THE   AGE   OF   IMAGINATION.  2/ 

Crusoe  is  probably  for  the  boyish  imagination,  more  than 
anything  else,  the  goer,  and  the  doer.1 

With  this  difference  in  the  elementary  constituents  of 
imagination,  there  are  others  which  turn  on  temperament, 
tone  of  feeling,  and  preponderant  directions  of  emotion. 
Imagination  is  intimately  bound  up  with  the  life  of  feeling, 
and  will  assume  as  many  directions  as  this  life  assumes. 
Hence,  the  familiar  fact  that  in  some  children  imagination 
broods  by  preference  on  gloomy  and  terrifying  objects, 
religious  and  other,  whereas  in  others  it  selects  what  is 
bright  and  gladsome  ;  that  while  in  some  cases  it  has  more 
of  the  poetic  quality,  in  others  it  leans  rather  to  the  scien- 
tific or  to  the  practical  type. 

Enough  has  been  said  perhaps  to  show  that  the  imag- 
inativeness of  children  is  not  a  thing  to  be  taken  for  granted 
as  existing  in  all  children  alike.  It  is  eminently  a  variable 
faculty  requiring  a  special  study  in  the  case  of  each  new 
child. 

But  even  waiving  this  fact  of  variability  it  may,  I  think, 
be  said  that  we  are  far  from  understanding  the  precise 
workings  of  imagination  in  children.  We  talk,  for  ex- 
ample, glibly  about  their  play,  their  make-believe,  their 
illusions  ;  but  how  much  do  we  really  know  of  their  state 
of  mind  when  they  act  out  a  little  scene  of  domestic  life, 
or  of  the  battle-field  ?  We  have,  I  know,  many  fine  ob- 
servations on  this  head.  Careful  observers  of  children  and 
conservers  of  their  own  childish  experiences,  such  as 
Rousseau,  Pestalozzi,  Jean  Paul,  Madame  Necker,  George 
Sand,  R.  L.  Stevenson,  tell  us  much  that  is  valuable :  yet  I 
suspect  that  there  must  be  a  much  wider  and  finer  investi- 
gation of  children's  action  and  talk  before  we  can  feel 

1  The  different  tendencies  of  children  towards  visual,  auditory, 
motor  images,  etc.,  are  dealt  with  by  P.  Queyrot,  L' Imagination  et 
ses  varietes  chez  I'enfant.  Cf.  an  article  by  \V.  H.  Burnham,  "  In- 
dividual Differences  in  the  Imagination  of  Children,"  Pedagogical- 
Seminary,  ii.,  2. 


28  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

quite  sure  that  we  have  got  at  their  mental  whereabouts, 
and  know  how  they  feel  when  they  pretend  to  enter  the 
dark  wood,  the  home  of  the  wolf,  or  to  talk  with  their 
deities,  the  fairies. 

Perhaps  I  have  said  enough  to  justify  my  plea  for  new 
observations  and  for  a  reconsideration  of  hasty  theories  in 
the  light  of  these.  Nor  need  we  object  to  a  fresh  survey  of 
what  is  perhaps  the  most  delightful  side  of  child-life.  I 
often  wonder  indeed  when  I  come  across  some  precious  bit 
of  droll  infantile  acting,  or  of  sweet  child-soliloquy,  how 
mothers  can  bring  themselves  to  lose  one  drop  of  the  fresh 
exhilarating  draught  which  daily  pours  forth  from  the  fount 
of  a  child's  phantasy. 

Nor  is  it  merely  for  the  sake  of  its  inherent  charm  that 
children's  imagination  deserves  further  study.  In  the 
early  age  of  the  individual  and  of  the  race  what  we  en- 
lightened persons  call  fancy  has  a  good  deal  to  do  with 
the  first  crude  attempts  at  understanding  things.  Child- 
thought,  like  primitive  folk-thought,  is  saturated  with  myth, 
vigorous  phantasy  holding  the  hand  of  reason — as  yet 
sadly  rickety  in  his  legs — and  showing  him  which  way  he 
should  take.  In  the  moral  life  again,  we  shall  see  how 
easily  the  realising  force  of  young  imagination  may  expose 
it  to  deception  by  others,  and  to  self-deception  too,  with 
results  that  closely  simulate  the  guise  of  a  knowing  false- 
hood. On  the  other  hand  a  careful  following  out  of  the 
various  lines  of  imaginative  activity  may  show  how 
moral  education,  by  vividly  suggesting  to  the  child's 
imagination  a  worthy  part,  a  praiseworthy  action,  may  work 
powerfully  on  the  unformed  and  flexible  structure  of  his 
young  will,  moving  it  dutywards. 

Imaginative   Transformation  of  Objects. 

The  play  of  young  imagination  meets  us  in  the 
domain  of  sense-observation  :  a  child  is  fancying  when  he 
looks  at  things  and  touches  them  and  moves  among  them. 


THE   AGE   OF    IMAGINATION.  29 

This  may  seem  a  paradox  at  first,  but  in  truth  there  is 
nothing  paradoxical  here.  It  is  an  exploded  psychological 
fallacy  that  sense  and  imagination  are  wholly  apart.  No 
doubt,  as  the  ancients  told  us,  phantasy  follows  and  is  the 
offspring  of  sense  :  we  live  over  again  in  waking  and  sleep- 
ing imagination  the  sights  and  sounds  of  the  real  world. 
Yet  it  is  no  less  true  that  imagination  in  an  active  con- 
structive form  takes  part  in  the  very  making  of  what  we 
call  sense-experience.  We  read  the  visual  symbol,  say, 
a  splash  of  light  or  colour,  now  as  a  stone,  now  as  a  pool 
of  water,  just  because  imagination  drawing  from  past  ex- 
perience supplies  the  interpretation,  the  group  of  qualities, 
which  composes  a  hard  solid  mass,  or  a  soft  yielding 
liquid. 

A  child's  fanciful  reading  of  things,  as  when  he  calls 
the  twinkling  star  a  (blinking)  eye,  or  the  dew-drops  on 
the  grass  tears,  is  but  an  exaggeration  of  what  we  all  do. 
His  imagination  carries  him  very  much  farther.  Thus  he 
may  attribute  to  the  stone  he  sees  a  sort  of  stone-soul,  and 
speak  of  it  as  feeling  tired  of  a  place. 

This  lively  way  of  envisaging  objects  is,  as  we  know, 
similar  to  that  of  primitive  folk,  and  has  something  of 
crude  nature-poetry  in  it.  This  tendency  is  abundantly 
illustrated  in  the  metaphors  which  play  so  large  a  part 
in  children's  talk.  As  all  observers  of  them  know  the}- 
are  wont  to  describe  what  they  see  or  hear  by  analogy 
to  something  they  know  already.  This  is  called  by 
some,  rather  clumsily  I  think,  apperceiving.  For  ex- 
ample, a  little  boy  of  two  years  and  five  months,  on 
looking  at  the  hammers  of  a  piano  which  his  mother 
was  playing,  called  out :  '  There  is  owlegie '  (diminutive 
of  owl).  His  eye  had  instantly  caught  the  similarity 
between  the  round  felt  disc  of  the  hammer  divided 
by  a  piece  of  wood,  and  the  owl's  face  divided  by 
its  beak.  In  like  manner  the  boy  C.  called  a  small 
oscillating  compass-needle  a  '  bird '  on  the  ground  of  its 


30  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

slightly  bird-like  form,  and  of  its  fluttering  movement.1 
Pretty  conceits  are  often  resorted  to  in  this  assimilation 
of  the  new  and  strange  to  the  familiar,  as  when  .a  child 
seeing  dew  on  the  grass  said,  '  The  grass  is  crying,'  or  when 
stars  were  described  as  "  cinders  from  God's  star,"  and 
butterflies  as  "  pansies  flying  ".2  Other  examples  of  this 
picturesque  mode  of  childish  apperception  will  meet  us 
below. 

This  play  of  imagination  in  connexion  with  apprehend- 
ing objects  of  sense  has  a  strong  vitalising  or  personify- 
ing element.  That  is  to  say,  the  child  sees  what  we  regard 
as  lifeless  and  soulless  as  alive  and  conscious.  Thus  he 
gives  not  only  body  but  soul  to  the  wind  when  it  whistles 
or  howls  at  night.  The  most  unpromising  things  come  in 
for  this  warming  vitalising  touch  of  the  child's  fancy.  He 
will  make  something  like  a  personality  out  of  a  letter. 
Thus  one  little  fellow  aged  one  year  eight  months  conceived  a 
special  fondness  for  the  letter  W,  addressing  it  thus  :  '  Dear 
old  boy  W  '.  Another  little  boy  well  on  in  his  fourth  year, 
when  tracing  a  letter  L  happened  to  slip  so  that  the 
horizontal  limb  formed  an  angle  thus,  U.  He  instantly 
saw  the  resemblance  to  the  sedentary  human  form 
and  said:  "  Oh,  he's  sitting  down".  Similarly  when  he 
made  an  F  turn  the  wrong  way  and  then  put  the 
correct  form  to  the  left  thus,  F7I,  he  exclaimed  :  "  They're 
talking  together". 

Sometimes  this  endowment  of  things  with  feeling  leads 
to  a  quaint  manifestation  of  sympathy.  Miss  Ingelow 
writes  of  herself:  When  a  little  over  two  years  old,  and 
for  about  a  year  after  "  I  had  the  habit  of  attributing 
intelligence  not  only  to  all  living  creatures,  the  same 
amount  and  kind  of  intelligence  that  I  had  myself,  but 
even  to  stones  and  manufactured  articles.  I  used  to  feel 

1  The  references  to  the  child  C.  are  to  the  subject  of  the  memoir 
given  below,  chap.  xi. 

2  W.  H.  Burnham,  loc.  cit.,  p.  212  f. 


THE   AGE   OF   IMAGINATION.  31 

how  dull  it  must  be  for  the  pebbles  in  the  causeway  to  be 
obliged  to  lie  still  and  only  see  what  was  round  about. 
When  L  walked  out  with  a  little  basket  for  putting  flowers 
in  I  used  sometimes  to  pick  up  a  pebble  or  two  and  carry 
them  on  to  have  a  change :  then  at  the  farthest  point  of 
the  walk  turn  them  out,  not  doubting  that  they  would  be 
pleased  to  have  a  new  view."  l 

This  is  by  no  means  a  unique  example  of  a  quaint 
childish  expression  of  pity  for  what  we  think  the  insen- 
tient world.  Plant-life  seems  often  to  excite  the  feeling. 
Here  is  a  quotation  from  a  parent's  chronicle  :  "  A  girl  aged 
eight,  brings  a  quantity  of  fallen  autumn  leaves  in  to  her 
mother,  who  says,  '  Oh  !  how  pretty,  F. ! '  to  which  the  girl 
answers  :  '  Yes,  I  knew  you'd  love  the  poor  things,  mother, 
I  couldn't  bear  to  see  them  dying  on  the  ground  '.  A  few 
days  afterwards  she  was  found  standing  at  a  window  over- 
looking the  garden  crying  bitterly  at  the  falling  leaves  as 
they  fell  in  considerable  numbers." 

t  need  not  linger  on  the  products  of  this  vitalising  and 
personifying  instinct,  as  we  shall  deal  with  them  again  when 
inquiring  into  children's  ideas  about  nature.  Suffice  it  to 
say  that  it  is  wondrously  active  and  far-reaching,  constitut- 
ing one  chief  manifestation  of  childish  fancy. 

Now  it  may  be  asked  whether  all  this  analogical  exten- 
sion of  images  to  what  seem  to  us  such  incongruous  objects 
involves  a  vivid  and  illusory  apprehension  of  these  as  trans- 
formed. Is  the  eyelid  realised  and  even  seen  for  the  moment 
as  a  sort  of  curtain,  the  curtain-image  blending  with  and 
transforming  what  is  present  to  the  eye  ?  Are  the  pebbles 
actually  viewed  as  living  things  condemned  to  lie  stiffly 
in  one  place  ?  It  is  of  course  hard  to  say,  yet  I  think  a 
conjectural  answer  can  be  given.  In  this  imaginative  con- 
templation of  things  the  child  but  half  observes  what  is 
present  to  his  eyes,  one  or  two  points  only  of  supreme 

1  See  her  article,  "  The  History  of  an  Infancy,"  Longman's 
Magazine,  Feb.,  1890. 


32  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

interest  in  the  visible  thing,  whether  those  of  form,  as  in 
assimilating  the  piano-hammer  to  the  owl,  or  of  action, 
as  the  falling  of  the  leaf,  being  selectively  alluded  to : 
while  assimilative  imagination  overlaying  the  visual  im- 
pression with  the  image  of  a  similar  object  does  the 
rest.  In  this  way  the  actual  field  of  objects  is  apt  to 
get  veiled,  transformed  by  the  wizard  touch  of  a  lively 
fancy. 

No  doubt  there  are  various  degrees  of  illusion  here.  In 
his  matter-of-fact  and  really  scrutinising  mood  a  child  will 
not  confound  what  is  seen  with  what  is  imagined  :  in  this 
case  the  analogy  recalled  is  distinguished  and  used  as  an 
explanation  of  what  is  seen — as  when  C.  observed  of  the 
panting  dog:  '  Dat  bow-wow  like  puff-puff'.  On  the  other 
hand  when  another  little  boy  aged  three  years  and  nine 
months  seeing  the  leaves  falling  exclaimed,  "  See,  mamma, 
the  leaves  is  flying  like  dickey-birds  and  little  butterflies," 
it  is  hard  not  to  think  that  the  child's  fancy  for  the  moment 
transformed  what  he  saw  into  these  pretty  semblances. 
And  one  may  risk  the  opinion  that,  with  the  little 
thinking  power  and  controlling  force  of  will  which  a 
child  possesses,  such  assimilative  activity  of  imagination 
always  tends  to  develop  a  degree  of  momentary  illusion. 
There  is,  too,  as  we  shall  see  later  on,  abundant 
evidence  to  show  that  children  at  first  quite  seriously 
believe  that  most  things,  at  least,  are  alive  and  have  their 
feelings. 

There  is  another  way  in  which  imagination  may  com- 
bine with  and  transform  sensible  objects,  viz.,  by  what  is 
commonly  called  association.  Mr.  Ruskin  tells  us  that 
when  young  he  associated  the  name  '  crocodile '  with  the 
creature  so  closely  that  the  long  series  of  letters  took  on 
something  of  the  look  of  its  lanky  body.  The  same 
writer  speaks  of  a  Dr.  Grant,  into  whose  therapeutic 
hands  he  fell  when  a  child.  "  The  name  (he  adds) 
is  always  associated  in  my  mind  with  a  brown  powder 


THE   AGE   OF   IMAGINATION.  33 

— rhubarb  or  the  like — of  a  gritty  or  acrid  nature.    .    .  . 
The  name  always  sounded  to  me  gr-r-ish  and  granular." 

We  can  most  of  us  perhaps,  recall  similar  experiences, 
where  colours  and  sounds,  in  themselves  indifferent,  took 
on  either  through  analogy  or  association  a  decidedly  re- 
pulsive character.  How  far,  one  wonders,  does  this  process 
of  transformation  of  things  go  in  the  case  of  imaginative 
children  ?  There  is  some  reason  to  say  that  it  may  go 
very  far,  and  that,  too,  when  there  is  no  strong  feeling  at 
work  cementing  the  combined  elements.  A  child's  feeling 
for  likeness  is  commonly  keen  and  subtle,  and  knowledge 
of  the  real  relations  of  things  has  not  yet  come  to  check 
the  impulse  to  this  free  far-ranging  kind  of  assimilation. 
Before  the  qualities  and  the  connexions  of  objects  are 
sufficiently  known  for  them  to  be  interesting  in  themselves, 
they  can  only  acquire  interest  through  the  combining  art 
of  childish  fancy.  And  the  same  is  true  of  associated 
qualities.  A  child's  ear  may  not  dislike  a  grating  sound, 
a  harsh  noise,  as  our  ear  dislikes  it,  merely  because  of  its 
effect  on  the  sensitive  organ.  En  revanche  it  will  like 
and  dislike  sounds  for  a  hundred  reasons  unknown  to  us, 
just  because  the  quick  strong  fancy  adding  its  life  to  that 
of  the  senses  gives  to  their  impressions  much  of  their 
significance  and  much  of  their  effect. 

There  is  one  new  field  of  investigation  which  is  illus- 
trating in  a  curious  way  the  wizard  influence  wielded  by 
childish  imagination  over  the  things  of  sense.  It  is  well 
known  that  a  certain  number  of  people  habitually  'colour' 
the  sounds  they  hear,  imagining,  for  example,  the  sound  of 
a  vowel,  or  of  a  musical  tone,  to  have  its  characteristic 
•  tint  which  they  are  able  to  describe  accurately.  This 
'  coloured  hearing,'  as  it  is  called,  is  always  traced  back  to 
the  dimly  recalled  age  of  childhood.  Children  are  now 
beginning  to  be  tested  and  it  is  found  that  a  good  propor- 
tion possess  the  faculty.  Thus,  in  some  researches  on  the 
minds  of  Boston  school-children,  it  was  found  that  twenty- 

3 


34  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

one  out  of  fifty-three,  or  nearly  40  per  cent.,  described 
the  tones  of  certain  instruments  as  coloured.1  The 
particular  colour  ascribed  to  an  instrument,  as  also  the 
degree  of  its  brightness,  though  remaining  constant  in 
the  case  of  the  same  child,  varied  greatly  among  different 
children,  so  that,  for  example,  one  child  '  visualised'  the  tone 
of  a  fife  as  pale  or  bright,  while  another  imaged  it  as  dark.2 
It  is  highly  probable  that  both  analogy  and  association 
play  a  part  here.3  As  was  recently  suggested  to  me  by 
a  correspondent  the  instance  given  by  Locke  of  the 
analogy  between  scarlet  and  the  note  of  a  trumpet  may 
easily  be  due  in  part  at  least  to  association  of  the  tone 
with  the  scarlet  uniform. 

I  may  add  that  I  once  happened  to  overhear  a  little 
girl  of  six  talking  to  herself  about  numbers  in  this  wise : 
"  Two  is  a  dark  number,"  "  forty  is  a  white  number".  I 
questioned  her  and  found  that  the  digits  had  each  its  dis- 
tinctive colour ;  thus  one  was  white ;  two,  dark ;  three,  white ; 
four,  dark  ;  five,  pink  ;  and  so  on.  Nine  was  pointed  and 
dark,  eleven  dark  green,  showing  that  some  of  the  digits 
were  much  more  distinctly  visualised  than  others.  Just 
three  years  later  I  tested  her  again  and  found  she  still 
visualised  the  digits,  but  not  quite  in  the  same  way.  Thus 
although  one  and  two  were  white  and  black  and  five  pink  as 
before,  three  was  now  grey,  four  was  red,  nine  had  lost  its 
colour,  and  eleven  oddly  enough  had  turned  from  dark  green 
to  bright  yellow.  This  case  suggests  that  in  early  life  new 
experiences  and  associations  may  modify  the  tint  and  shade 
of  sounds.  However  this  be,  children's  coloured  hearing  is 


1  See  the  article  by  G.  Stanley  Hall,  "  The  Contents  of  Children's 
Minds,"  Princeton  Review. 

-Ibid.,  p.  265. 

3  This  has  been  well  brought  out  by  Professor  Flournoy  of 
Geneva  in  his  volume  Des  Phenomenes  de  Synopsie  (audition  coloree), 
chap.  ii. 


THE   AGE   OF   IMAGINATION.  35 

worth  noting  as  the  most  striking  example  of  the  general  ten- 
dency to  overlay  impressions  of  the  senses  with  vivid  images. 
It  seems  reasonable  to  suppose  that  coloured  hearing  and 
other  allied  phenomena,  as  the  picturing  of  numbers,  days 
of  the  week,  etc.,  in  a  certain  scheme  or  diagrammatic  ar- 
rangement, when  they  show  themselves  after  childhood  are 
to  be  viewed  as  survivals  of  early  fanciful  brain-work.  This 
fact  taken  along  with  the  known  vividness  of  the  images  in 
coloured  hearing,  which  in  certain  cases  approximate  to 
sense-perceptions,  seems  to  me  to  confirm  the  view  here  put 
forth  that  children's  imagination  may  alter  the  world  of  sense 
in  ways  which  it  is  hard  for  our  older  and  stiff-jointed  minds 
to  follow. 

I  have  confined  myself  here  to  what  I  have  called  the 
play  of  imagination,  the  magic  transmuting  of  things 
through  the  sheer  liveliness  and  wanton  activity  of 
childish  fancy.  How  strong,  how  vivid,  how  dominating 
such  imaginative  transformation  may  become  will  of  course 
be  seen  in  cases  where  violent  feeling,  especially  fear, 
gives  preternatural  intensity  to  the  mind's  realising  power. 
But  this  will  be  better  considered  later  on. 

This  transformation  of  the  actual  surroundings  is 
of  course  restrained  in  serious  moments,  and  in  inter- 
course with  older  and  graver  folk.  There  is,  however,  a 
region  of  child-life  where  it  knows  no  check,  where  the 
impulse  to  deck  out  the  shabby  reality  with  what  is  bright 
and  gay  has  all  its  own  way.  This  region  is  Play. 

Imagination  and  Play. 

The  interest  of  child's  play  in  the  present  connexion  lies 
in  the  fact  that  it  is  the  working  out  into  visible  shape  of  an 
inner  fancy.  The  actual  presentation  may  be  the  starting- 
point  of  this  process  of  imaginative  projection  :  the  child, 
for  example,  sees  the  sand,  the  shingle  and  shells,  and  says, 
1  Let  us  play  keeping  a  shop'.  Yet  this  is  accidental.  The 


36  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

source  of  play  is  the  impulse  to  realise  a  bright  idea:  whence, 
as  we  shall  see  by-and-by,  its  close  kinship  to  art  as  a 
whole.  This  image  is  the  dominating  force,  it  is  for  the 
time  a  veritable  idle  fixe,  and  everything  has  to  accommodate 
itself  to  this.  Since  the  image  has  to  be  acted  out,  it  comes 
into  collision  with  the  actual  surroundings.  Here  is  the 
child's  opportunity.  The  floor  is  instantly  mapped  out 
into  two  hostile  territories,  the  sofa-end  becomes  a  horse, 
a  coach,  a  ship,  or  what  not,  to  suit  the  exigencies  of  the 
play. 

This  stronger  movement  and  wider  range  of  imagina- 
tion in  children's  pastime  is  explained  by  the  characteristic 
and  fundamental  impulse  of  play,  the  desire  to  be  some- 
thing, to  act  a  part.  The  child-adventurer  as  he  personates 
Robinson  Crusoe  or  other  hero  steps  out  of  his  every-day 
self  and  so  out  of  his  every-day  world.  In  realising  his- 
part  he  virtually  transforms  his  surroundings,  since  they 
take  on  the  look  and  meaning  which  the  part  assigns  to 
them.  This  is  prettily  illustrated  in  one  of  Mr.  Steven- 
son's child-songs,  "  The  Land  of  Counterpane,"  in  which 
a  sick  child  describes  the  various  transformations  of  the 
bed-scene : — 

And  sometimes  for  an  hour  or  so 
I  watched  my  leaden  soldiers  go, 
With  different  uniforms  and  drills, 
Among  the  bed-clothes  through  the  hills; 

And  sometimes  sent  my  ships  in  fleets. 
All  up  and  down  among  the  sheets  ; 
Or  brought  my  trees  and  houses  out, 
And  planted  cities  all  about. 

Who  can  say  to  how  many  and  to  what  strange  play- 
purposes  that  stolid  unyielding-looking  object  a  sofa-head 
has  been  turned  by  the  ingenuity  of  the  childish  brain  ? 

The  impulse  to  act  a  part  meets  us  very  early  and 
grows  out  of  the  assimilative  instinct.  The  very  infant 


THE   AGK   OF    IMAGINATION.  37 

will,  if  there  is  a  cup  to  hand,  pretend  to  drink  out  of  it.1 
Similarly  a  boy  of  two  will  put  the  stem  of  his  father's 
pipe  into,  or,  if  cautious,  near  his  mouth,  and  make  believe 
that  he  is  smoking.  A  little  boy  not  yet  two  years  old 
would  spend  a  whole  wet  afternoon  "painting"  the  furniture 
with  the  dry  end  of  a  bit  of  rope.  In  such  cases,  it  is 
evident,  the  playing  may  start  from  a  suggestion  supplied 
by  the  sight  of  an  object.  There  is  no  need  to  suppose 
that  in  this  simple  kind  of  imitative  play  children  know- 
ingly act  a  part.  It  is  surely  to  misunderstand  the 
essence  of  play  to  speak  of  it  as  a  fully  conscious  process 
of  imitative  acting.2  A  child  is  one  creature  when  he  is 
truly  at  play,  another  when  he  is  bent  on  astonishing  or 
amusing  you.  It  seems  sufficient  to  say  that  when  at  play 
he  is  possessed  by  an  idea,  and  is  working  this  out  into 
visible  action.  Your  notice,  your  laughter,  may  bring  in 
a  new  element  of  enjoyment ;  for  as  we  all  know,  children 
are  apt  to  be  little  actors  in  the  full  sense,  and  to  aim  at 
producing  an  impression.  Yet  the  child  as  little  needs 
your  flattering  observation  as  the  cat  needs  it,  when  he 
plays  in  the  full  sense  imaginatively,  and  in  make-believe, 
with  his  captured  mouse,  placing  it,  for  example,  deliber- 
ately under  a  copper  in  the  scullery,  and  amusing  himself 
by  the  half-illusion  of  losing  it.  Indeed  your  intrusion 
will  be  just  as  likely  to  destroy  or  at  least  to  diminish  the 
<:harm  of  a  child's  play,  if  only  through  your  inability  to 
seize  his  idea,  and,  what  is  equally  important,  to  rise  to  his 
own  point  of  enthusiasm  and  illusive  realisation.  Perhaps, 
indeed,  one  may  say  that  the  play-instinct  is  most  vigorous 
and  dominant  when  a  child  is  alone,  or  at  least  self- 
absorbed  ;  for  even  social  play,  delightful  as  it  is  when  all 

1  Of  course,  as  Preyer  suggests,  this  drinking  from  an  empty 
<:up  may  at  first  be  due  to  a  want  of  discriminative  perception. 

'2  M.  Compayre  seems  to  go  too  far  in  this  direction  when  he 
talks  of  the  child's  play  with  its  doll  as  a  charming  comedy  of 
maternity  (L'  Evolution  intell.  et  morale  de  FEnfant,  p.  274). 


38  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  players  are  attuned,  is  subject  to  disturbance  through 
a  want  of  mutual  comprehension  and  a  need  of  half-dis- 
illusive  explanations.1 

The  essence  of  children's  play  is  the  acting  of  a  part 
and  the  realising  of  a  new  situation.  It  is  thus,  as  we  shall 
see  more  fully  by-and-by,  akin  to  dramatic  action,  only 
that  the  child's  'acting'  is  like  M.  Jourdain's  prose,  an 
unconscious  art.  The  impulse  to  be  something,  a  sailor,  a 
soldier,  a  path-finder,  or  what  not,  absorbs  the  child  and 
makes  him  forget  his  real  surroundings  and  his  actual  self. 
His  day-dreams,  his  solitary  and  apparently  listless  wander- 
ings while  he  mutters  mystic  words  to  himself,  all  illustrate 
this  desire  to  realise  a  part.  In  this  playful  self-projection 
a  child  will  become  even  something  non-human,  as  when 
he  nips  the  '  bread -and -cheese '  shoots  off  the  bushes 
and  fancies  himself  a  horse.2  It  is  to  be  noted  that  such 
passing  out  of  one's  ordinary  self  and  assuming  a  foreign 
existence  is  confined  to  the  child-player ;  the  cat  or  the 
dog,  though  able,  as  Mr.  Darwin  and  others  have  shown, 
to  go  through  a  kind  of  make-believe  game,  remaining 
always  within  the  limits  of  his  ordinary  self. 

Such  play-like  transmutation  of  the  self  extends  beyond 
what  we  are  accustomed  to  call  play.  One  little  boy  of 
three  and  a  half  years  who  was  fond  of  playing  at  the  useful 
business  of  coal-heaving  would  carry  his  coal-heaver's 
dream  through  the  whole  day,  and  on  the  particular  day 
devoted  to  this  calling  would  not  only  refuse  to  be  ad- 
dressed by  any  less  worthy  name,  but  ask  in  his  prayer  to- 
be  made  a  good  coal-heaver  (instead  of  the  usual  '  good 
boy ').  On  other  days  this  child  lived  the  life  of  a  robin 
redbreast,  a  soldier,  and  so  forth,  and  bitterly  resented  his 
mother's  occasional  confusion  of  his  personalities.  A  little 

1  For  a  good  illustration  of  the  disillusive  effect  of  want  of  en- 
thusiasm in  one's  playmates,  see  Tolstoi,  Childhood,  Boyhood,  Youth, 
part  i.,  chap.  viii. 

-  Uninitiated,  p.  10. 


THE   AGE   OF   IMAGINATION.  39 

girl  aged  only  one  year  and  ten  months  insisted  upon 
being  addressed  by  a  fancy  name,  Isabel,  when  she  was 
put  to  bed,  but  would  not  be  called  by  this  name  at  any 
other  time.  She  probably  passed  into  what  seemed  to  her 
another  person  when  she  went  to  bed  and  gave  herself  up 
to  sweet  '  hypnagogic  '  reverie. 

In  the  working  out  of  this  impulse  to  realise  a 
part  the  actual  external  surroundings  may  take  a  surpris- 
ingly small  part.  Sometimes  there  is  scarcely  any  adjust- 
ment of  scene :  the  child  plays  out  his  action  with  purely 
imaginary  surroundings.  Such  simple  play-actions  as 
going  to  market  to  buy  imaginary  apples  occur  very  early, 
one  mother  assuring  me  that  all  her  children  carried  them 
out  in  the  second  year  before  they  could  talk.  Another 
mother  writes  of  her  boy,  aged  two  and  a  half  years  :  "  He 
amuses  himself  by  pretending  things.  He  will  fetch  an 
imaginary  cake  from  a  corner,  rake  together  imaginary 
grass,  or  fight  a  battle  with  imaginary  soldiers."  This 
reminds  one  of  Mr.  Stevenson's  lines  : — 

It  is  he,  when  you  play  with  your  soldiers  of  tin, 
Who  sides  with  the  French  and  who  never  can  win. 

This  impulse  to  invent  imaginary  surroundings,  and 
more  especially  to  create  mythical  companions,  is  very 
common  among  lonely  and  imaginative  children.  A  lady 
friend,  a  German,  tells  me  that  when  she  was  a 
little  girl,  a  lonely  one  of  course,  she  invented  a  kind  of 
alter  ego,  another  girl  rather  older  than  herself,  whom  she 
named  'Krofa' — why  she  has  forgotten.  She  made  a 
constant  playmate  of  her,  and  got  all  her  new  ideas  from 
her.  Mr.  Canton's  little  heroine  took  to  nursing  an  in- 
visible '  iccle  gaal '  (little  girl),  the  image  of  which  she 
seemed  able  to  project  into  space.1  The  invention  of 
fictitious  persons  fills  a  large  space  in  child-life.  Perhaps 

1  The  Invisible  Playmate,  p.  33  ff. 


4O  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

if  only  the  young  imagination  is  strong  enough  there  is,  as 
already  hinted,  more  of  sweet  illusion,  of  a  warm  grasp  of 
living  reality  in  this  solitary  play,  where  fictitious  com- 
panions perfectly  obedient  to  the  little  player's  will  take 
the  place  of  less  controllable  tangible  ones.  But  such 
purely  imaginative  make-believe,  which  derives  no  help 
from  actual  things,  is  perhaps  hardly  '  play '  in  the  full 
sense,  but  rather  an  active  form  of  day-dreaming  or 
romancing.1 

In  much  of  this  playful  performance  all  the  interference 
with  actual  surroundings  that  the  child  requires  is  change 
of  place  or  scene.  Here  is  a  pretty  example  of  this 
simple  type  of  imaginative  play.  A  child  of  twenty  months, 
who  is  accustomed  to  meet  a  bonne  and  child  in  the  Jardin 
du  Luxembourg,  suddenly  leaves  the  family  living-room, 
pronouncing  indifferently  well  the  names  Luxembourg, 
nurse,  and  child.  He  goes  into  the  next  room,  pretends 
to  say  "  good-day"  to  his  two  out-door  acquaintances,  and 
then  returns  and  simply  narrates  what  he  has  been  doing.- 
Here  the  simple  act  of  passing  into  an  adjoining  room  was 
enough  to  secure  the  needed  realisation  of  the  encounter  in 
the  garden.  The  movement  into  the  next  room  is  sugges- 
tive. Primarily  it  meant  no  doubt  the  child's  manner  of 
realising  the  out-of-door  walk  ;  yet  I  suspect  there  was 
another  motive  at  work.  Children  love  to  enact  their  little 
play-scenes  in  some  remote  spot,  withdrawn  from  notice, 
where  imagination  suffers  no  let  from  the  interference  of 

1  I  fail  to  understand  what  Professor  Mark  Baldwin  means  by 
saying  that  an  only  child  is  wanting  in  imagination  (op.  cit.,  p.  358).     In 
his  emphasising  of  the  influence  of  imitation  and  external  suggestion 
the  writer  seems  to  have  overlooked  the  rather  obvious   fact  that 
childish  imagination  in  its  intenser  and  more  energetic  forms  means 
a  detachment  from  the  sensible  world,  and  that  lonely  children  are, 
as  more  than  one  autobiography,  as  well  as  mother's  record,  show, 
particularly  imaginative  just  because   of  the  absence  of  engaging 
activities  in  the  real  world. 

2  Egger  quoted  by  Compayre,  op.  rtV.,  pp.  149,  150. 


THK   AGE   OF    IMAGINATION.  41 

mother,  nurse,  or  other  member  of  the  real  environment. 
How  many  a  thrilling  exciting  play  has  been  carried  out  in 
a  corner,  especially  if  it  be  dark,  or  better  still,  screened  off. 
The  fascination  of  curtainjed  spaces,  as  those  behind  the 
window  curtains,  or  under  the  table  with  the  table-cloth 
hanging  low,  will  be  fresh  in  the  memory  of  all  who  can 
recall  their  childhood. 

A  step  towards  a  more  realistic  kind  of  play-action,  in 
which,  as  in  the  modern  theatre,  imagination  is  propped  up 
by  strong  stage  effects,  is  taken  when  a  scene  is  constructed, 
the  chairs  and  sofa  turned  into  ships,  carriages,  a  railway 
train,  and  so  forth. 

Yet,  after  all,  the  scene  is  but  a  very  subordinate  part 
of  the  play.  Next  to  himself  in  his  new  part,  proudly 
enjoying  the  consciousness  of  being  a  general,  or  a  school- 
mistress, a  child  who  is  not  content  with  the  pure  creations 
of  his  phantasy  requires  the  semblance  of  living  com- 
panions. In  all  play  he  desires  somebody,  if  only  as 
listener  to  his  talk  in  his  new  character;  and  when  he  does 
,not  rise  to  an  invisible  auditor,  he  will  talk  to  such  un- 
promising things  as  a  sponge  in  the  bath,  a  fire-shovel,  a 
clothes'  prop  in  the  garden,  and  so  forth.  In  more  active  play, 
where  something  has  to  be  done,  he  generally  desires  a  full 
companion  and  assistant,  human  or  animal.  And  here  we 
meet  with  what  is  perhaps  the  most  interesting  feature  of 
childish  play,  the  transmutation  of  the  most  meagre  and 
least  promising  of  things  into  complete  living  forms.  I  have 
already  alluded  to  the  sofa-head.  How  many  forms  of 
animal  life,  vigorous  and  untiring,  from  the  patient  donkey 
up  to  the  untamed  horse  of  the  prairies,  has  this  most  inert- 
looking  ridge  served  to  image  forth  to  quick  boyish 
perception. 

The  introduction  of  these  living  things  seems  to  illustrate 
the  large  compass  of  the  child's  realising  power.  Mr. 
Ruskin  speaks  somewhere  of  "  the  perfection  of  child-like 
imagination,  the  power  of  making  everything  out  of 


42  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

nothing  ".  "The  child,"  he  adds,  "  does  not  make  a  pet 
of  a  mechanical  mouse  that  runs  about  the  floor.  .  .  .  The 
child  falls  in  love  with  a  quiet  thing — with  an  ugly  one- 
nay,  it  may  be  with  one  to  us  totally  devoid  of  meaning. 
The  besoin  de  croire  precedes  the  besoin  cT aimer." 

The  quotation  brings  us  to  the  focus  where  the  rays  of 
childish  imagination  seem  to  converge,  the  transformation 
of  toys. 

The  fact  that  children  make  living  things  out  of  their 
toy  horses,  dogs  and  the  rest,  is  known  to  every  observer 
of  their  ways.  To  the  natural  unsceptical  eye  the  boy  on 
his  rudely  carved  "gee-gee"  slashing  the  dull  flank  with 
all  a  boy's  glee,  looks  as  if  he  were  realising  the  joy 
of  actual  riding,  as  if  he  were  possessed  with  the  fancy 
that  the  stiff  least  organic-looking  of  structures  which  he 
strides  is  a  very  horse. 

The  liveliness  of  this  realising  imagination  is  seen  in 
the  extraordinary  poverty  and  meagreness  of  the  toys 
which  to  their  happy  possessors  are  wholly  satisfying. 
Here  is  a  pretty  picture  of  child's  play  from  a  German 
writer : — 

There  sits  a  little  charming  master  of  three  years  before  his 
small  table  busied  for  a  whole  hour  in  a  fanciful  game  with  shells. 
He  has  three  so-called  snake-heads  in  his  domain  ;  a  large  one  and 
two  smaller  ones :  this  means  two  calves  and  a  cow.  In  a  tiny 
tin  dish  the  little  farmer  has  put  all  kinds  of  petals,  that  is  the 
fodder  for  his  numerous  and  fine  cattle.  .  .  .  When  the  play  has 
lasted  a  time  the  fodder-dish  transforms  itself  into  a  heavy  waggon 
with  hay :  the  little  shells  now  become  little  horses,  and  are  put  to 
the  shafts  to  pull  the  terrible  load. 

The  doll  takes  a  supreme  place  in  this  fancy  realm  of 
play.  It  is  human  and  satisfies  higher  instincts  and  emo- 
tions. As  the  French  poet  says,  the  little  girl — 

Rdve  le  nom  de  mere  en  bezant  sa  poupee.1 
1  Goltz,  Buck  tier  Kindheit,  pp.  4,  5. 


THE   AGE   OF   IMAGINATION.  43 

I  read  somewhere  recently  that  the  doll  is  a  plaything 
for  girls  only :  but  boys,  though  they  often  prefer  india- 
rubber  horses  and  other  animals,  not  infrequently  go- 
through  a  stage  of  doll-love  also,  and  are  hardly  less 
devoted  than  girls.  Endless  is  the  variety  of  role  assigned 
to  the  doll  as  to  the  tiny  shell  in  our  last  picture  of  play. 
The  doll  is  the  all-important  comrade  in  that  solitude  a 
deux  of  which  the  child,  like  the  adult,  is  so  fond.  Mrs. 
Burnett  tells  us  that  sitting  holding  her  doll  in  the  arm- 
chair of  the  parlour  she  would  sail  across  enchanted  seas  to 
enchanted  islands  having  all  sorts  of  thrilling  adventures. 
At  another  time  when  she  wanted  to  act  an  Indian  chief 
the  doll  just  as  obediently  took  up  the  part  of  squaw. 

Very  humanely,  on  the  whole,  is  the  little  doll-lover 
wont  to  use  her  pet,  even  though,  as  George  Sand  reminds 
us,  there  come  moments  of  rage  and  battering.1  A  little 
boy  of  two  and  a  half  years  asked  his  mother  one  day : 
"  Will  you  give  me  all  my  picture-books  to  show  dolly  ? 
I  don't  know  which  he  will  like  best."  He  then  pointed 
to  each  and  looked  at  the  doll's  face  for  the  answer.  He 
made  believe  that  it  selected  one,  and  then  gravely  showed 
it  all  the  pictures,  saying :  "  Look  here,  dolly !  "  and  care- 
fully explaining  them. 

The  doll  illustrates  the  childish  attitude  towards  all 
toys,  the  impulse  to  take  them  into  the  innermost  and 
warmest  circle  of  personal  intimacy,  to  make  them  a  living 
part  of  himself.  A  child's  language,  as  we  shall  see  later, 
points  to  an  early  identification  of  self  with  belongings. 
The  '  me '  and  the  '  my  '  are  the  same,  or  nearly  the  same, 
to  a  mite  of  three.  This  impulse  to  attach  the  doll  to  self, 
or  to  embrace  it  within  the  self-consciousness  or  self- 
feeling,  shows  itself  in  odd  ways.  In  the  grown-up  child, 
Laura  Bridgman,  it  took  the  form  of  putting  a  bandage 
like  her  own  over  her  doll's  eyes.  This  resembles  a  case  of 

1  See  the  study  of  George  Sand's  childhood  below,  chap.  xii. 


44  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

a  girl  of  six,  who  when  recovering  from  measles  was  observed 
to  be  busily  occupied  with  her  dolls,  each  of  which  she 
painted  over  with  bright  red  spots.  The  dolly  must  do  all, 
and  be  all  that  I  am  :  so  the  child  in  his  warm  attachment 
seems  to  argue.  This  feeling  of  oneness  is  strengthened  by 
that  of  exclusive  possession,  the  sense  that  the  child  himself 
is  the  only  one  who  really  knows  dolly,  can  hear  her  cry 
when  she  cries  and  so  forth.1  It  is  another  manifestation 
of  the  same  feeling  of  intimacy  and  solidarity  when  a  child 
insists  on  dolly's  being  treated  by  others  as  courteously 
as  himself.  Children  will  often  expect  the  mother  or 
nurse  to  kiss  and  say  good-night  to  their  pet  or  pets — for 
their  hearts  are  capacious — when  she  says  good-night  to 
themselves. 

Here,  nobody  can  surely  doubt,  we  have  clearest  evi- 
dence of  play-illusion.  The  lively  imagination  endows  the 
inert  wooden  thing  with  the  warmth  of  life  and  love. 
How  large  a  part  is  played  here  by  the  alchemist,  fancy, 
is  known  to  all  observers  of  children's  playthings.  The 
faith  and  the  devotion  often  seem  to  increase  as  the  first 
meretricious  charms,  the  warm  tints  of  the  cheek  and  the 
lips,  the  well-shaped  nose,  the  dainty  clothes,  prematurely 
fade,  and  the  lovely  toy  which  once  kept  groups  of  hungry- 
looking  children  gazing  long  at  the  shop-window,  is  reduced 
to  the  naked  essence  of  a  doll.  A  child's  constancy  to  his 
doll  when  thus  stript  of  exterior  charms  and  degraded  to 
the  lowest  social  stratum  of  dolldom  is  one  of  the  sweetest 
and  most  humorous  things  in  child-life. 

And  then  what  rude  unpromising  things  are  adopted 
as  doll-pets.  Mrs.  Burnett  tells  us  she  once  saw  a  dirty 
mite  sitting  on  a  step  in  a  squalid  London  street,  cuddling 
warmly  a  little  bundle  of  hay  tied  round  the  middle  by  a 
string.  Here,  surely,  the  besoin  d?  aimer  was  little  if  anything 
behind  the  besoin  de  croire. 

1  C/.  Perez,  U A  rt  d  la  Pocsie  chcz  V enfant,  p.  28. 


THE   AGK   OF    IMAGINATION.  45 

Do  any  of  us  really  understand  this  doll-superstition  ? 
Writers  of  a  clear  long-reaching  memory  have  tried  to  take 
us  back  to  childhood,  and  restore  to  us  for  a  moment  the 
whole  undisturbed  trust,  the  perfect  satisfaction  of  love, 
which  the  child  brings  to  its  doll.  Yet  even  the  imagina- 
tive genius  of  a  George  Sand  is  hardly  equal,  perhaps,  to 
the  feat  of  resuscitating  the  buried  companion  of  our  early 
days  and  making  it  live  once  more  before  our  eyes.1  The 
truth  is  the  doll-illusion  is  one  of  the  first  to  pass.  There 
are,  I  believe,  a  few  sentimental  girls  who,  when  they 
attain  the  years  of  enlightenment,  make  a  point  of  saving 
their  dolls  from  the  general  wreckage  of  toys.  Yet  I  suspect 
the  pets  when  thus  retained  are  valued  more  for  the  outside 
charm  of  pretty  face  and  hair,  and  still  more  for  the 
lovely  clothes,  than  for  the  inherent  worth  of  the  doll  itself, 
of  what  we  may  call  the  doll-soul  which  informs  it  and 
gives  it,  for  the  child,  its  true  beauty  and  its  worth. 

Yet  if  we  cannot  get  inside  the  old  doll-superstition  we 
may  study  it  from  the  outside,  and  draw  a  helpful  com- 
parison between  it  and  other  known  forms  of  nai've 
credulity.  And  here  we  have  the  curious  fact  that  the 
doll  exists  not  only  for  the  child  but  for  the  "  nature  man  ". 
Savages,  Sir  John  Lubbock  tells  us,'2  like  toys,  such  as 
dolls,  Xoah's  Arks,  etc.  The  same  writer  remarks  that  the 
doll  is  "  a  hybrid  between  the  baby  and  the  fetish,  and  that 
it  exhibits  the  contradictory  characters  of  its  parents ". 
Perhaps  the  changes  of  mood  towards  the  doll,  of  which 
George  Sand  writes,  illustrate  the  alternating  preponder- 
ance of  the  baby  and  the  fetish  half.  But  as  Sir  John  also 
remarks,  this  hybrid  is  singularly  unintelligible  to  grown- 
up people,  and  it  seems  the  part  of  modesty  here  to  bow  to 
one  of  nature's  mysteries. 

It  has  been  suggested  to  me  by  Mr.  F.  Galton  that  a 

1  For  her  remarkable  analysis  of  the  child's  feeling  for  his  dolL 
see  below,  chap.  xii. 

-Origin  of  Civilisation,  appendix,  p.  521. 


46  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

useful  inquiry  might  be  carried  out  into  the  relation  be- 
tween a  child's  preference  in  the  matter  of  doll  or  other  toy 
and  the  degree  of  his  imaginativeness  as  otherwise  shown, 
e.g.,  in  craving  for  story,  and  in  romancing.  So  far  as  I  have 
inquired  I  am  disposed  to  think  that  such  a  relation  exists. 
A  lady  who  has  had  a  large  experience  as  a  Kindergarten 
teacher  tells  me  that  children  who  play  with  rough  shapeless 
things,  and  readily  endow  with  life  the  ball,  and  so  forth,  in 
Kindergarten  games  are  imaginative  in  other  ways.  Here 
is  an  example  : — 

P.  Me.  L.,  a  girl,  observed  from  three  and  a  half  to  five  years  of 
age,  was  a  highly  imaginative  child  as  shown  by  the  power  of  make- 
believe  in  play.  The  ball  of  soft  india-rubber  was  to  her  on  the  teacher's 
suggestion,  say,  a  baby,  and  on  it  she  would  lavish  all  her  tenderness, 
kissing  it,  feeding  it,  washing  its  face,  dressing  it  in  her  pinafore,  etc. 
So  thorough  was  her  delight  in  the  play  that  the  less  imaginative 
children  around  her  would  suspend  their  play  at  '  babies '  and  watch 
her  with  interest.  Whilst  a  most  indifferent  restless  child  at  lessons, 
whenever  a  story  was  told  she  sat  motionless  and  wide-eyed  till 
the  close. 

Children  sometimes  make  babies  of  their  younger 
brothers  and  sisters,  going  through  all  the  sweet  solicitous 
offices  which  others  are  wont  to  carry  out  on  their  dolls.1 
This  suggests  another  and  closely  related  question  :  Do 
the  more  imaginative  children  prefer  the  inert,  ugly  doll 
to  the  living  child  in  these  nursing  pastimes  ?  What  is  the 
real  relation  in  the  child's  play  between  the  toy-companion, 
the  doll  or  india-rubber  dog",  and  the  living  companion  ? 
Again,  a  child  will  occasionally  play  with  an  imaginary 
doll.'2  How  is  this  impulse  related  to  the  other  two  forms 
of  doll-passion  ?  These  points  would  well  repay  a  careful 
investigation. 

The  vivification  of  the  doll  or  toy  animal  is  the  out- 

1  Baldwin  gives  a  pretty  example  of  this,  op.  cit.,  p.  362. 
-  An  example  is  given  by  Paola  Lombroso,  Psicologia  del  Bambino, 
p.  126. 


THE   AGE   OF    IMAGINATION.  47 

come  of  the  play-impulse,  and  this,  as  we  have  seen,  is  an 
impulse  to  act  out,  to  realise  an  idea  in  outward  show. 
The  absorption  in  the  idea  and  its  outward  expression 
serves,  as  in  the  case  of  the  hypnotised  subject,  to  blot  out 
the  incongruities  of  scene  and  action  which  you  or  I,  a 
cold  observer,  would  note.  The  play-idea  works  transform- 
ingly  by  a  process  analogous  to  what  is  called  auto-sugges- 
tion. 

How  complete  this  play-illusion  may  become  here  can 
be  seen  in  more  ways  than  one.  We  see  it  in  the  jealous 
insistence  already  illustrated  that  everything  shall  for  the 
time  pass  over  from  the  every-day  world  into  the  new 
fancy-created  one.  "About  the  age  of  four,"  writes  M.  Egger 
of  his  boys,  "  Felix  is  playing  at  being  coachman,  Emile 
happens  to  return  home  at  the  moment.  In  announcing 
his  brother,  Felix  does  not  say,  '  Emile  is  come/  he  says, 
'  The  brother  of  the  coachman  is  come '."  l 

As  we  saw  above,  the  child's  absorption  in  his  new 
play-world  is  shown  by  his  imperious  demand  that  others, 
as  his  mother,  shall  recognise  his  new  character.  Pestalozzi's 
little  boy,  aged  three  years  and  a  half,  was  one  day  playing 
at  being  butcher,  when  his  mother  called  him  by  his  usual 
diminutive, '  Jacobli '.  He  at  once  replied  :  "  No,  no  ;  you 
should  call  me  butcher  now  ".2  Here  is  a  story  to  the  same 
effect,  sent  me  by  a  mother.  A  little  girl  of  four  was  play- 
ing '  shops '  with  her  younger  sister.  "  The  elder  one  was 
shopman  at  the  time  I  came  into  her  room  and  kissed  her. 
She  broke  out  into  piteous  sobs,  I  could  not  understand 
why.  At  last  she  sobbed  out :  '  Mother,  you  never  kiss  the 
man  in  the  shop '.  I  had  with  my  kiss  quite  spoilt  her  illu- 
sion." 

The  intensity  of  the  realising  power  of  imagination  in  play 
is  seen  too  in  the  stickling  for  fidelity  to  the  original  in  all 

1  Quoted  by  Compayre,  op.  cit.,  p.  150. 

2De  Guimp's  Life  of  Pestalozzi  (Engl.  trans.),  p.  41. 


48  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

playful  reproduction,  whether  of  scenes  observed  in  every- 
day life  or  of  what  has  been  narrated.  The  same  little 
boy  who  showed  his  picture-books  to  dolly  was,  we  are  told, 
when  two  years  and  eight  months  old,  fond  of  imagining 
that  he  was  Priest,  his  grandmamma's  coachman.  "  He 
drives  his  toy  horse  from  the  arm-chair  as  a  carriage, 
getting  down  every  minute  to  '  let  the  ladies  out,'  or  to  '  go 
shopping '.  The  make-believe  extends  to  his  insisting  on 
the  reins  being  held  while  he  gets  down  and  so  forth/' 
The  same  thing  shows  itself  in  acting  out  stories.  The 
full  enjoyment  of  the  realisation  depends  on  the  faithful 
reproduction,  on  the  suitable  outward  embodiment  of  the 
distinct  idea  in  the  child's  mind. 

The  following  anecdote  bears  another  kind  of  testimony, 
a  most  winsome  kind,  to  the  realising  power  of  play.  One 
day  two  sisters  said  to  one  another :  "  Let  us  play  being 
sisters".  This  might  well  sound  insane  enough  to  hasty  ears  ; 
but  is  it  not  really  eloquent  ?  To  me  it  suggests  that  the 
girls  felt  they  were  not  realising  their  sisterhood,  enjoying 
all  the  possible  sweets  of  it,  as  they  wanted  to  do — perhaps 
there  had  been  a  quarrel  and  a  supervening  childish  cold- 
ness. And  they  felt  too  that  the  way  to  get  this  more  vivid 
sense  of  what  they  were,  or  ought  to  be,  one  to  the  other,  was 
by  playing  the  part,  by  acting  a  scene  in  which  they  would 
come  close  to  one  another  in  warm  sympathetic  fellow- 
ship. 

But  there  is  still  another,  and  some  will  think  a  more 
conclusive  way  of  satisfying  ourselves  of  the  reality  of  the 
play-illusion.  The  child  finds  himself  confronted  by  the 
unbelieving  adult  who  questions  what  he  says  about  the 
doll's  crying  and  so  forth.  One  little  girl,  aged  one  year  and 
nine  months,  when  asked  by  her  mother  how  her  doll,  who 
had  lost  his  arms,  ate  his  dinner  without  hands,  quick ly 
changed  the  subject.  She  did  not  apparently  like  having 
difficulties  brought  into  her  happy  play-world.  But  the  true 
tenacious  faith  shows  itself  later  when  the  child  understands 


THE   AGE   OF    IMAGINATION.  49 

these  sceptical  questionings  of  others,  and  sees  that  they  are 
poking  fun  at  his  play  and  his  day-dreamings.  Such  cruel 
quizzings  of  his  make-believe  are  apt  to  cut  him  to  the 
quick.  I  have  heard  of  children  who  will  cry  if  a  stranger 
suddenly  enters  the  nursery  when  they  are  hard  at  play, 
and  shows  himself  unsympathetic  and  critical. 

Play  may  produce  not  only  this  vivid  imaginative 
realisation  at  the  time,  but  a  sort  of  mild  permanent 
illusion.  Sometimes  it  is  a  toy-horse,  in  one  case  communi- 
cated to  me  it  was  a  funny-looking  toy-lion,  more  frequently 
it  is  the  human  effigy,  the  doll,  which  as  the  result  of 
successive  acts  of  imaginative  vivification  gets  taken  up 
into  the  relation  of  permanent  companion  and  pet. 
Clusters  of  happy  associations  gather  about  it,  investing  it 
with  a  lasting  vitality  and  character.  A  mother  once  asked 
her  boy  of  two  and  a  half  years  if  his  doll  was  a  boy  or  a 
girl.  He  said  at  first,  "  A  boy,"  but  presently  correcting 
himself  added,  "I  think  it  is  a  baby".  Here  we  have  a 
challenging  of  the  inner  conviction  by  a  question,  a  moment 
of  reflexion,  and  as  a  result  of  this,  an  unambiguous 
confession  of  faith  that  the  doll  had  its  place  in  the  living 
human  family. 

Here  is  a  more  stubborn  exhibition  on  the  part  of  an- 
other boy  of  this  lasting  faith  in  the  plaything  called  out 
by  others'  sceptical  attitude.  "  When  (writes  a  lady  corre- 
spondent) he  was  just  over  two  years  old  L.  began  to  speak 
of  a  favourite  wooden  horse  (Dobbin)  as  if  it  were  a  real 
living  creature.  '  Xo  tarpenter  (carpenter)  made  Dobbin,' 
he  would  say,  '  he  is  not  wooden  but  kin  (skin)  and  bones 
and  Dod  (God)  made  him.'  If  any  one  said '  it '  in  speaking 
of  the  horse  his  wrath  was  instantly  aroused,  and  he  would 
shout  indignantly  :  '  It !  You  mutt'ent  tay  "it,"  you  mut  tay 
he '.  He  imagined  the  horse  was  possessed  of  every  virtue 
and  it  was  strange  to  see  what  an  influence  this  creature  of 
his  own  imagination  exercised  over  him.  If  there  was 
anything  L.  particularly  wished  not  to  do  his  mother  had 

4 


50  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

only  to  say  :  '  Dobbin  would  like  you  to  do  this,'  and  it  was 
done  without  a  murmur." 

There  is  another  domain  of  childish  activity  closely 
bordering  on  that  of  play  where  a  like  suffusion  of  the 
world  of  sense  by  imagination  meets  us.  I  refer  to  pictures 
and  artistic  representations  generally.  If  in  the  case  of  adults 
there  is  a  half  illusion,  a  kind  of  oneirotic  or  trance  condition 
induced  by  a  picture  or  dramatic  spectacle,  in  the  case  of 
the  less-instructed  child  the  illusion  is  apt  to  become  more 
complete.  A  picture  seems  very  much  of  a  toy  to  a  child. 
A  baby  of  eight  or  nine  months  will  talk  to  a  picture  as  to 
a  living  thing ;  and  something  of  this  tendency  to  make  a 
fetish  of  a  drawing  survives  much  later.  But  it  will  be 
more  convenient  to  deal  with  the  attitude  of  the  child-mind 
towards  pictorial  representations  in  connexion  with  his  art- 
tendencies. 

The  imaginative  transformation  of  things,  more 
particularly  the  endowing  of  lifeless  things  with  life,  enters, 
I  believe,  into  all  children's  pastimes.  Whence  comes  the 
perennial  charm,  the  undying  popularity,  of  the  hoop  ?  Is 
not  the  interest  here  due  to  the  circumstance  that  the 
child  controls  a  moving  thing  which  in  the  capricious  varia- 
tions of  its  course  simulates  a  free  will  of  its  own  ?  As  I 
understand  it,  trundling  the  hoop  is  imaginative  play  hardly 
less  than  riding  the  horse-stick  and  slashing  its  flanks. 
Who  again  that  can  recall  early  experiences  will  doubt  that 
the  delight  of  flying  the  kite,  of  watching  it  as  it  sways  to 
the  right  or  to  the  left,  threatening  to  fall  head-foremost 
to  earth,  and  most  of  all  perhaps  of  sending  a  paper 
'  messenger '  along  the  string  to  the  wee  thing  poised  like 
a  bird  so  terribly  far  away  in  the  blue  sky,  is  the  delight  of 
imaginative  play?  The  same  is  true  of  sailing  boats,  and 
other  pastimes  of  early  childhood. 

I  have  here  touched  merely  on  the  imaginative  and 
half-illusory  side  of  children's  play.  It  is  to  be  remembered, 
however,  that  play  is  much  more  than  this,  and  reflects 


THE    AGE   OF    IMAGINATION.  51 

much  more  of  the  childish  mind.  Play  proper  as  distin- 
guished from  mere  day-dreaming  is  activity  and  imitative 
activity ;  and  children  show  marked  differences  in  the 
energy  of  this  activity,  and  in  the  quickness  and  close- 
ness of  their  responses  to  the  model  actions  of  the  real 
nurse,  real  coachman,  and  so  forth.  That  is  to  say,  obser- 
vation of  others  will  count  here.  Again,  while  social 
surroundings,  opportunities  for  imitation,  are  important, 
they  are  by  no  means  all-decisive.  Children  show  a 
curious  selectiveness  in  their  imitative  games,  germs  of 
differential  interest,  sexual  and  individual,  revealing  them- 
selves quite  early.  It  may  be  added  that  a  child  with  few 
opportunities  of  observation  may  get  quite  enough  play- 
material  from  story  land.  But  play  is  never  merely 
imitative,  save  indeed  in  the  case  of  unintelligent  and 
'  stoggy '  children.  It  is  a  bright  invention  into  which 
all  the  gifts  of  childish  intelligence  may  pour  themselves. 
The  relation  of  play  to  art  will  engage  us  later  on. 

Free  Projection  of  Fancies. 

In  play  and  the  kindred  forms  of  imaginative  activity 
just  dealt  with,  we  have  been  concerned  with  imagina- 
tive realisation  in  its  connexion  with  sense-perception. 
And  here,  it  is  to  be  noticed,  there  is  a  kind  of  reciprocal 
action  between  sense  and  imagination.  On  the  one  hand, 
as  we  have  seen,  imagination  interposes  a  coloured  medium, 
so  to  speak,  between  the  eye  and  the  object,  so  that  it 
becomes  transformed  and  beautified.  On  the  other  hand, 
in  what  is  commonly  called  playing,  imaginative  activity 
receives  valuable  aid  from  the  senses.  The  stump  of  a 
doll,  woefully  unlike  as  it  is  to  what  the  child's  fancy 
makes  it,  is  yet  a  sensible  fact,  and  as  such  gives  support 
and  substance  to  the  realising  impulse. 

Now  this  fact  that  imagination  derives  support  from 
sense  leads  to  a  habit  of  projecting  fancies,  and  giving  them 
an  external  and  local  habitation.  In  this  way  the  idea 


52  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

receives  a  certain  solidity  and  fixity  through  its  embodi- 
ment in  the  real  physical  world. 

This  incorporation  of  images  in  the  system  of  the  real 
world  may,  like  play,  start  at  one  of  two  ends.  On  the 
one  hand,  the  external  world,  so  far  as  it  is  only  dimly 
perceived,  excites  wonder,  curiosity,  and  the  desire  to  fill 
in  the  blank  spaces  with  at  least  the  semblance  of  know- 
ledge. Here  distance  exercises  a  strange  fascination.  The 
remote  chain  of  hills  faintly  visible  from  the  child's  home,, 
has  been  again  and  again  endowed  by  his  enriching  fancy 
with  all  manner  of  wondrous  scenery  and  peopled  by  all 
manner  of  strange  creatures.  The  unapproachable  sky— 
which  to  the  little  one,  so  often  on  his  back,  is  much  more 
of  a  visible  object  than  to  us — with  its  wonders  of  blue  ex- 
panse and  cloudland,  of  stars  and  changeful  moon,  is  wont 
to  occupy  his  mind,  his  bright  fancy  quite  spontaneously 
filling  out  this  big  upper  world  with  appropriate  forms. 

This  stimulating  effect  of  the  half-perceivable  is  seen 
in  still  greater  intensity  in  the  case  of  what  is  hidden  from 
sight.  The  spell  cast  on  the  young  mind  by  the  mystery 
of  holes,  and  especially  of  dark  woods,  and  the  like,  is 
known  to  all.  C.'s  peopling  of  a  dark  wood  with  his  betes 
noires  the  wolves  illustrates  this  tendency. 

"What  (writes  a  German  author  already  quoted)  all 
childish  fancy  has  almost  without  exception  in  common,  is 
the  idea  of  a  wholly  new  and  unheard-of  world  behind  the 
remote  horizon,  behind  woods,  lakes  and  hills,  and  all 
objects  reached  by  the  eye.  When  I  was  a  child  and  we 
played  hide  and  seek  in  the  barn,  I  always  felt  that  there 
must  or  might  be  behind  every  bundle  of  straw,  and 
especially  in  the  corners,  something  unheard  of  lying 
hidden.  And  yet  I  had  no  profane  curiosity,  no  desire  to 
experiment  by  turning  over  the  bundle  of  straw.  It  was 
just  a  fancy,  and  though  I  half  recognised  it  as  such  it  was 
lively  enough  to  engage  me  as  a  reality."  The  same 
writer  goes  on  to  describe  how  his  imagination  ever 


THE   AGE   OF    IMAGINATION.  53 

occupied  itself  with  what  lay  behind  the  long  stretch  of  wood 
which  closed  in  a  large  part  of  his  child's  horizon.1 

This  imaginative  filling  up  of  the  remote  and  the  hidden 
recesses  of  the  outer  world  is  subject  to  manifold  stimulat- 
ing influences  from  the  region  of  feeling.  We  know  that  all 
vivid  imagination  is  charged  with  emotion,  and  this  is  em- 
phatically true  of  children's  phantasies.  The  unseen,  the 
hidden,  contains  unknown  possibilities,  something  awful, 
terrible,  it  may  be,  to  make  the  timid  wee  thing  shudder 
in  anticipatory  vision,  or  wondrously  and  surprisingly 
beautiful.  How  far  the  childish  attitude  is. from  intellectual 
curiosity  is  seen  in  the  remark  of  Goltz,  that  no  impious 
attempt  is  made  to  probe  the  mystery. 

The  other  way  in  which  this  happy  fusion  of  fancy 
with  incomplete  perception  may  be  effected  is  through  the 
working  of  the  impulse  to  give  outward  embodiment  to 
vivid  and  persistent  images.  All  play,  as  we  have  seen, 
is  an  illustration  of  the  impulse,  and  certain  kinds  of  play 
show  the  working  of  the  impulse  in  its  purity.  It 
extends,  however,  beyond  the  limits  of  what  is  commonly 
known  as  play.  The  instance  quoted  above,  the  peopling 
of  a  certain  wood  with  wolves  by  the  child  C.,  was  of  course 
due  in  part  to  the  fact  that  the  small  impressionable  brain 
was  at  this  time  much  occupied  with  the  idea  of  the  wolf. 
Dickens  and  others  have  told  us  how  when  children  they 
were  wont  to  project  into  the  real  world  the  lively  images 
acquired  from  storyland.  When  suitable  objects  present 
themselves  the  images  are  naturally  enough  linked  on  to 
these.  Thus  Dickens  writes  :  "  Every  burn  in  the  neigh- 
bourhood, every  stone  of  the  church,  every  foot  of  the 
churchyard  had  some  association  of  its  own  in  my  mind 
connected  with  these  books  (Roderic  Random,  Tom  Jones, 
Gil  Bias,  etc.),  and  stood  for  some  locality  made  famous  in 
them.  I  have  seen  Tom  Piper  go  climbing  up  the  church 

1  Goltz,  Das  Bitch  der  Kindheit,  p.  276. 


54  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

steeple ;    I  have  watched  Strap  with  the  knapsack  on  his 
back  stopping  to  rest  himself  on  the  wicket-gate."1 

Along  with  this  attachment  of  images  to  definite  objects 
there  goes  a  good  deal  of  vague  localisation  in  dim  half- 
realised  quarters  of  space.  The  supernatural  beings,  the 
fairies,  the  bogies,  and  the  rest,  are,  as  might  be  expected, 
relegated  to  these  obscure  and  impenetrable  regions.  It 
would  be  worth  while  perhaps  to  collect  a  children's  com- 
parative mythology,  if  only  to  see  what  different  localities, 
geographic  and  cosmic,  the  childish  mind  is  apt  to  assign 
to  his  fabulous  beings.  The  poor  fairies  seem  to  have  been 
forced  to  find  an  abode  in  most  dissimilar  regions.  The 
boy  C.  selected  the  wall  of  his  bedroom — hardly  a  dignified 
abode,  though  it  had  the  merit  of  being  within  reach  of  his 
prayers.  A  child  less  bent  on  turning  the  superior  person- 
ages to  practical  account  will  set  them  in  some  remoter 
quarter,  in  a  vast  forest,  or  deep  cavern,  on  a  distant  hill, 
or  higher  up  in  the  blue  above  the  birds.  But  systems  of 

child-mythology  will  occupy  us  again. 

1 

Imagination  and  Storyland. 

We  may  now  pass  to  a  freer  region  of  imaginative 
activity  where  the  child's  mind  gives  life  and  reality  to  its 
images  without  incorporating  them  into  the  outer  sensible 
world,  even  to  the  extent  of  talking  to  invisible  playmates. 
The  world  of  story,  as  distinct  from  that  of  play,  is  the 
great  illustration  of  this  detached  activity  of  fancy. 

The  entrance  into  storyland  can  only  take  place  when 
the  key  of  language  is  put  into  the  child's  hand.  A  story 
is  a  verbal  representation  of  a  scene  or  action,  and  the 
process  of  imaginative  realisation  depends  in  this  case  on 
the  stimulating  effect  of  words  in  their  association  with 
ideas.  Now  a  word  has  not  for  a  child  the  peculiar  force  of 
an  imitative  sensuous  impression,  say  that  of  a  picture. 

1  Quoted  by  Forster,  Life  of  Charles  Dickens,  chap.  i. 


THE   AGE   OF   IMAGINATION'.  55 

The  toy,  the  picture,  being,  however  roughly,  a  likeness  or 
show,  brings  the  idea  before  the  child's  eyes  in  a  way  in 
which  the  word-symbol  cannot  do.  Yet  we  may  easily  under- 
estimate the  stimulating  effect  of  words  on  children's  minds, 
which  are  much  more  tender  and  susceptible  than  we  are 
wont  to  suppose.  To  call  out  to  a  child,  '  Bow,  wow  ! ' 
or  '  Policeman  ! '  may  be  to  excite  in  his  mind  a  vivid 
image  which  is  in  itself  an  approach  to  a  complete  sensuous 
realisation  of  the  thing.  We  cannot  understand  the  fascina- 
tion of  a  story  for  children  save  by  remembering  that  for 
their  young  minds,  quick  to  imagine  and  unversed  in 
abstract  reflexion,  words  are  not  dead  thought-symbols, 
but  truly  alive  and  perhaps  "  winged  "  as  the  old  Greeks 
called  them. 

It  may  not  be  easy  to  explain  fully  this  stimulating 
power  of  words  on  the  childish  mind.  There  is  some 
reason  to  say  that  in  these  early  days  spoken  words  as 
sounds  for  the  ear  have  in  themselves  something  of  the 
immediate  objective  reality  of  all  sense-impressions,  so  that 
to  name  a  thing  is  in  a  sense  to  make  it  present. 
However  this  be,  words  as  sense-presentations  have 
a  powerful  suggestive  effect  on  children's  imagination, 
calling  up  particularly  vivid  images  of  the  objects 
named.  The  effect  is  probably  aided  by  the  child's 
nascent  feeling  of  reverence  for  another's  words  as  authori- 
tative utterances. 

This  impulse  to  realise  words  makes  the  child  a  listener 
much  more  frequently  than  we  suppose.  How  often  is  the 
mother  surprised  and  amused  at  a  question  put  by  her 
child  about  something  said  in  his  presence  to  a  servant,  a 
visitor,  or  a  workman  ;  something  which  in  her  grown-up 
way  she  assumed  would  not  be  of  the  slightest  interest  to 
him.  In  this  manner,  words  soon  become  a  great  power  in 
the  new  wondering  life  of  a  child.  They  lodge  like  flying 
seedlings  in  the  fertile  brain,  and  shoot  up  into  strange 
imaginative  growths.  But  of  this  more  by-and-by. 


56  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

This  profound  and  lasting  effect  of  words  is  nowhere 
more  clearly  seen  than  in  the  spell  of  the  story.  We 
grown-up  people  are  wont  to  flatter  ourselves  that  we  read 
stories :  the  child,  if  he  could  know  what  we  call  reading, 
would  laugh  at  it.  With  what  deftness  does  the  little 
brain  disentangle  the  language,  often  strange  and  puzzling 
enough,  reducing  it  by  a  secret  child-art  to  simplicity  and 
to  reality.  A  mother  when  reading  a  poem  to  her  boy  of 
six,  ventured  to  remark,  "  I'm  afraid  you  can't  understand 
it,  dear,"  for  which  she  got  duly  snubbed  by  her  little 
master  in  this  fashion  :  "  Oh,  yes,  I  can  very  well, 
if  only  you  would  not  explain  ".  The  explaining  is  re- 
sented because  it  interrupts  the  child's  own  spontaneous 
image-building,  wherein  lies  the  charm,  because  it  rudely 
breaks  the  spell  of  the  illusion,  calling  off  the  attention 
from  the  vision  he  sees  in  the  word-crystal,  which  is  all  he 
cares  about,  to  the  cold  lifeless  crystal  itself. 

And  what  a  bright  vision  it  is  that  is  there  gained. 
How  clearly  scene  after  scene  of  the  dissolving  view  un- 
folds itself.  How  thrilling  the  anticipation  of  the  next 
unknown,  undiscernible  stage  in  the  history.  Perhaps  no 
one  has  given  us  a  better  account  of  the  state  of  absorp- 
tion in  storyland,  the  oneirotic  or  dream -like  condition  of 
complete  withdrawal  from  the  world  of  sense  into  an  inner 
world  of  fancy,  than  Thackeray.  In  one  of  his  delightful 
"  Roundabout  Papers,"  he  thus  writes  of  the  experiences  of 
early  boyhood.  "  Hush !  I  never  read  quite  to  the  end 
of  my  first  Scottish  Chiefs.  I  couldn't.  I  peeped  in  an 
alarmed  furtive  manner  at  some  of  the  closing  pages.  .  .  . 
Oh,  novels,  sweet  and  delicious  as  the  raspberry  open  tarts 
of  budding  boyhood  !  Do  I  forget  one  night  after  prayers 
('when  we  under-boys  were  sent  to  bed)  lingering  at  my 
cupboard  to  read  one  little  half-page  more  of  my  dear 
Walter  Scott — and  down  came  the  monitor's  dictionary  on 
my  head  !  " 

As    one    thinks    of    the    deep    delights    of    these    first 


THE   AGE   OF   IMAGINATION.  57 

excursions  into  storyland  one  almost  envies  the  lucky  boys 
whom  the  young  Charles  Dickens  held  spellbound  with 
his  tales. 

The  intensity  of  the  delight  is  seen  in  the  greed  it 
generates.  Who  can  resist  the  child's  hungry  demand  for 
a  story  ?  Edgar  Quinet  in  his  Histoire  de  mes  Idces  tells 
how  when  a  child  an  old  corporal  came  to  drill  him. 
He  had  been  taken  prisoner  by  the  Spaniards  and  placed  on 
an  inaccessible  island.  Edgar  loved  to  hear  the  thrilling 
story  of  the  old  soldier's  adventures,  and  scarcely  was  the 
narrative  finished  when  the  greedy  boy  would  exclaim, 
"  Encore  une  fois  !  "  Heine's  delight  when  a  boy  at  Diis- 
seldorf  in  drinking  in  the  stories  of  Napoleon's  exploits 
from  his  drummer  is  another  well-known  illustration. 

Through  the  perfect  gift  of  visual  realisation  which  a 
child  brings  to  it  the  verbal  narrative  becomes  a  record  of 
fact,  a  true  history.  The  intense  enjoyment  which  is 
bound  up  with  this  process  of  imaginative  realisation 
makes  children  jealously  exact  as  to  accuracy  in  repetition. 
The  boy  C.  when  a  story  was  repeated  to  him  used  to 
resent  even  a  small  alteration  of  the  text.  Woe  to  the 
unfortunate  mother  who  in  telling  one  of  the  good  stock 
nursery  tales  varies  a  detail.  One  such,  a  friend  of  mine, 
repeating  '  Puss  in  Boots '  inadvertently  made  the  hero 
sit  on  a  chair  instead  of  on  a  box  to  pull  on  his  boots. 
She  was  greeted  by  a  sharp  volley  of  '  No's  ! '  The  same 
lady  tells  me  that  when  narrating  the  story  of  '  Beauty  and 
the  Beast '  for  the  second  time  only  she  forgot  in  describ- 
ing the  effect  of  the  Beast's  sighing  to  add  after  the  words 
4  till  the  glasses  on  the  table  shake '  '  and  the  candles  are 
nearly  blown  out '  ;  whereupon  the  severe  little  listener 
at  once  stopped  the  narrator  and  supplied  the  interesting 
detail.  The  exacting  memory  of  childhood  in  the  matter 
of  stories  is  the  product  of  a  full  detailed  realisation.  In 
the  case  just  quoted  the  reality  of  the  story  was  con- 
tradicted by  substituting  a  stupid  conventional  chair  for 


58  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  box,  and  by  omitting  the  striking  incident  of  the 
candles. 

Happy  age  of  childhood,  when  a  new  and  wondrous 
world,  created  wholly  by  the  magic  of  a  lively  phantasy,  rivals 
in  brightness,  in  distinctness  of  detail,  aye,  and  in  stead- 
fastness too,  the  nearest  spaces  of  the  world  on  which  the 
bodily  eye  looks  out,  before  reflexion  has  begun  to  draw 
a  hard  dividing  line  between  the  domains  of  historical  truth 
and  fiction. 

As  the  demand  for  faithful  repetition  of  story  shows, 
the  imaginative  realisation  continues  when  the  story  is  no 
longer  heard  or  read.  It  has  added  something  to  the 
child's  inner  supplementary  world,  given  him  one  more 
lovely  region  in  which  he  may  live  blissful  moments.  The 
return  of  the  young  mind  to  the  persons  and  scenes  of 
story  is  forcibly  illustrated  in  the  impulse,  already  touched 
on,  to  act  out  in  play  the  parts  of  this  and  that  heroic  figure. 
With  many  children  any  narrative  which  holds  the  imagina- 
tion delightfully  enthralled  is  likely  to  become  more  full}* 
realised  in  a  visible  embodiment.  For  instance,  a  child  of 
five  years,  when  told  a  story  of  four  men  going  along  a 
railway  to  stop  a  train  before  it  neared  a  bridge  which  was 
on  fire,  at  once  proceeded  to  play  the  incident  with  his  toy 
train.  Here  we  see  how  story  by  contributing  lively 
images  to  the  child's  brain  becomes  one  main  stimulative 
and  guiding  influence  in  the  domain  of  play.  In  like 
manner  the  images  born  of  story  may,  as  in  the  case  of 
Dickens,  attach  themselves  permanently  to  particular 
localities  and  objects. 

To  this  lively  imaginative  reception  of  what  is  told  him 
the  child  is  apt  very  soon  to  join  his  own  free  inventions 
of  figures,  human,  superhuman,  or  subhuman.  The  higher 
qualities  of  this  invention  properly  come  under  the  head  of 
child-art,  and  will  have  to  be  considered  in  another  chapter. 
Here  we  may  glance  at  these  inventions  as  illustrating  the 
realising  power  of  the  child's  imagination. 


THE    AGE   OF    IMAGINATION.  59 

This  invention  appears  in  a  sporadic  manner  in  oc- 
casional '  romancings '  which  may  set  out  from  some 
observation  of  the  senses.  A  little  boy  aged  three  and  a 
half  years  seeing  a  tramp  limping  along  with  a  bad  leg 
exclaimed :  "  Look  at  that  poor  ole  man,  mamma,  he  has  dot 
(got)  a  bad  leg  ".  Then  romancing,  as  he  was  now  wont  to 
do :  "  He  dot  on  a  very  big  1orse,  and  he  fell  off  on  some 
great  big  stone,  and  he  hurt  his  poor  leg  and  he  had  to  get 
a  big  stick.  We  must  make  it  well."  Then  after  a 
thoughtful  pause  :  "  Mamma,  go  and  kiss  the  place  and  put 
some  powdey  (powder)  on  it  and  make  it  wrell  like  you  do 
to  I  ".  The  unmistakable  childish  seriousness  here,  the 
outflow  of  young  compassion,  and  the  charming  enforce- 
ment of  the  nursery  prescription,  all  point  to  a  vivid  realisa- 
tion of  this  extemporised  little  romance.  This  child  was 
moreover  more  than  commonly  tender-hearted,  and  perhaps 
the  more  exposed  on  that  account  to  such  amiable  self- 
deception.  Another  small  boy  when  a  little  over  two  years, 
happening  to  hear  a  buzzing  on  the  window,  said  : 
"  Mamma,  bumble-bee  in  a  window  says  it  wants  a  yump 
(lump)  of  sugar  "  :  then  shaking  his  head  sternly,  added  : 
"  Soon  make  you  heat-spots,  bumble-bee  ".  Other  examples 
of  this  romancing  will  be  met  with  in  the  notes  on  the 
child  C. 

In  such  simple  fashion  does  the  child  build  up  a  tiny 
myth  on  the  basis  of  some  passing  impression,  supplying 
out  of  his  quaintly  stored  fancy  unlooked-for  adornments 
to  the  homely  occurrences  of  every-day  life. 

Partly  by  taking  in  and  fully  realising  the  wonders  of 
story,  partly  by  the  independent  play  of  an  inventive 
imagination,  children's  minds  pass  under  the  dominion  of 
more  orlessenduring  myths.  The  princes  and  princessesand 
dwarfs  and  gnomes  of  fairy-tale,  the  workers  of  Christmas 
miracles,  Santa  Claus  and  Father  Christmas,  as  well  as  the 
beings  fashioned  by  the  child's  imagination  on  the  model  of 
those  he  knows  from  story,  these  live  on  like  the  people  of 


60  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  every-day  world,  are  apt  to  appear  in  dreams,  in  the 
dark,  at  odd  dreamy  moments  when  the  things  of  sense 
lose  their  hold,  bringing  into  the  child's  life  golden  sunlight 
or  black  awful  shadows,  the  most  real  of  all  realities. 

This  childish  belief  in  myth  is  often  curiously  tenacious. 
A  father  was  once  surprised  to  find  that  his  boy  aged  five 
years  and  ten  months  continued  naively  to  believe  in  the 
real  personality  of  Santa  Claus.  It  was  Christmastide  and 
the  father,  in  order  to  test  the  child's  credulity,  put  his  own 
pocket-knife  into  the  stocking  which  Santa  Claus  was 
supposed  to  fill.  The  child,  though  he  knew  his  father's 
knife  very  well,  did  not  in  the  least  suspect  that  the  knife 
he  found  in  the  stocking  had  been  placed  there  by  human 
hands,  but  expressed  himself  as  pleased  that  Santa  Claus 
had  sent  him  one  like  his  father's.  When  his  father  followed 
this  up  by  telling  him  that  he  had  lost  his  knife,  and  by 
searching  for  it  in  the  boy's  presence,  the  latter  asked 
whether  Santa  Claus  had  stolen  the  knife — thus  showing 
how  its  close  similarity  to  the  knife  he  had  received  had 
impressed  him,  though  he  would  not  for  a  moment  doubt 
the  fact  of  its  coming  from  the  mysterious  personage.  It 
might  be  thought  that  this  child  was  particularly  stupid. 
On  the  contrary  he  was  well  above  the  average  in  intelli- 
gence. In  proof  of  this  I  may  relate  that  the  Christmas 
before  this,  that  is  to  say  when  he  was  under  five  years,  he 
was  the  only  one  among  thirty  children  who  recognised 
his  uncle  when  extremely  well  disguised  as  Father  Christ- 
mas. When  asked  by  his  father  why  he  thought  it  was  his 
uncle,  he  said  at  first  he  didn't  know,  but  thinking  a 
moment  he  added,  "  I  don't  see  who  else  there  is,"  showing 
that  he  had  reasoned  out  his  belief  by  a  method  of  ex- 
clusion. 

Of  course  it  will  be  said  that  I  am  here  selecting  excep- 
tional cases  of  childish  imagination.  I  am  quite  ready  to 
admit  the  probability  of  this.  The  best  examples  of  any 
trait  of  the  young  mind  will  obviously  be  supplied  by  those 


THE   AGE   OF   IMAGINATION.  6 1 

who  have  most  of  this  trait.  Yet  I  very  much  suspect  that 
ordinary  and  even  dull  children  are  wont  to  hide  away  a 
good  deal  of  such  superstitious  belief.  "  One  of  the  greatest 
pleasures  of  childhood,"  says  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  in 
The  Poet  of  tfa  Breakfast  Table,  "  is  found  in  the  mysteries 
which  it  hides  from  the  scepticism  of  the  elders  and  works 
up  into  small  mythologies  of  its  own." 

I  have  treated  the  myths  of  children  as  a  product  of 
pure  imagination,  of  the  impulse  to  realise  in  vivid  images 
what  lies  away  from  and  above  the  world  of  sense.  Yet, 
as  we  shall  see  later,  they  are  really  more  than  this. 
They  contain,  like  the  myths  of  primitive  man,  a  true 
germ  of  thought. 

In  George  Sand's  recollections  we  shall  meet  with  a 
striking  illustration  of  how  the  vivid  imagination  of  super- 
natural beings  is  followed  up  by  a  reflective  and  half-scientific 
effort  to  connect  the  myth  with  the  facts  and  laws  of  the 
known  world.  This  infusion  of  childish  reason  into  wonder- 
land, the  first  crude  attempt  to  adjust  belief  to  belief,  and 
to  find  points  of  attachment  for  the  much-loved  myth  in 
the  matter-of-fact  world,  is  apt  to  lead,  as  we  shall  see,  to 
a  good  deal  that  is  very  quaint  and  characteristic  in  the 
child's  mythology. 

The  conclusion  which  observation  of  children  leads  us 
to  is  that,  as  compared  with  adults,  they  are  endowed  with 
strong  imaginative  power,  the  activity  of  which  leads  to  a 
surprisingly  intense  inner  realisation  of  what  lies  above 
sense.  For  the  child,  as  for  primitive  man,  reality  is  a  pro- 
jection of  fancy  as  well  as  an  assurance  of  sense. 

Now  this  conclusion  is,  I  think,  greatly  strengthened  by 
all  that  we  know  of  the  conditions  of  the  brain-life  in 
children,  and  of  the  many  perturbations  to  which  it  is 
liable.  With  respect  to  this  brain-life  we  have  to  remember 
that  in  the  first  years  the  higher  cortical  centres  which  take 
part  in  the  co-ordinative  and  regulative  processes  of  thought 
and  volition  are  but  very  imperfectly  developed.  Hence 


62  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  centres  concerned  in  imagination — which,  if  not  identi- 
cal with  what  used  to  be  called  the  sensorium  or  seat  of 
sensation,  are  in  closest  connexion  with  it — are  not 
checked  and  inhibited  by  the  action  of  the  higher  centres 
as  is  the  case  with  us.  By  exercising  a  volitional  control 
over  the  flow  of  our  ideas,  we  are  able  to  reason  away  a 
fancy,  and  generally  to  guard  ourselves  against  error.  In 
young  children  all  ideas  that  grow  clear  and  full  under  the 
stimulus  of  a  strong  interest  are  apt  to  persist  and  to  become 
preternaturally  vivid.  As  has  been  suggested  by  more  than 
one  recent  writer  on  childhood  and  education,  the  brain 
of  a  child  has  a  slight  measure  of  that  susceptibility  to 
powerful  illusory  suggestion  which  characterises  the  brain 
of  a  hypnotised  subject.  Savages,  who  show  so  striking  a 
resemblance  to  children  in  the  vivacity  and  the  dominance 
of  their  fancy,  are  probably  much  nearer  to  the  child  than 
to  the  civilised  adult  in  the  condition  of  their  brain. 

This  preternatural  liveliness  of  the  images  of  the 
imperfectly  developed  brain  exposes  children,  as  we  know, 
to  disturbing  illusion.  The  effect  of  bad  dreams,  of  intense 
feeling,  particularly  of  fear,  in  developing  illusory  belief 
in  sensitive  and  delicate  children  is  familiar  enough,  and 
will  be  dealt  with  again  later  on.  Some  parents  feel  the 
dangers  of  such  disturbance  so  keenly  that  they  think  it 
best  to  cut  their  children  off  from  the  world  of  fiction 
altogether.  But  this  is  surely  an  error.  For  one  thing 
children  who  are  strongly  imaginative  will  be  certain  to 
indulge  their  fancies,  as  the  Bronte  girls  did,  even  when 
no  fiction  is  supplied  and  their  eager  little  minds  are 
thrown  on  the  matter-of-fact  newspaper.  A  child  needs 
not  to  be  deprived  of  story  altogether,  but  to  be  supplied 
with  bright  and  happy  stories,  in  which  the  gruesome  ele- 
ment is  subordinate.  Specially  sensitive  children  should, 
I  think,  be  guarded  against  much  that  from  an  older  point 
of  view  is  classic,  as  some  of  the  '  creepy'  stories  in  Grimm, 
though  there  are  no  doubt  hardy  young  nerves  which 


THE   AGE   OF    IMAGINATION.  63 

can  thrill  enjoyably  under  these  horrors.  As  to  confusing 
a  child's  sense  of  truth  by  indulging  him  in  story,  the  evil 
seems  to  me  problematic,  and,  if  it  exists  at  all,  only  slight 
and  temporary.  But  I  hope  to  touch  on  this  aspect  of  the 
subject  in  the  next  chapter. 


64 


III. 

THE  DAWN  OF  REASON. 
The  Process  of  Thought. 

To  treat  the  child's  mind  as  merely  a  harbourer  of  fancies, 
as  completely  subject  to  the  illusive  spell  of  its  bright 
imagery,  would  be  the  grossest  injustice.  It  is  one  of  the 
reputable  characteristics  of  childhood  that  it  manages  to 
combine  with  so  much  vivacity  and  force  of  imagination 
a  perfectly  grave  matter-of-fact  look-out  on  the  actual 
world. 

And  here  I  should  like  to  correct  the  common  supposi- 
tion that  children  are  imaginative  or  observant  of  their 
surroundings,  but  not  both.  I  have  no  doubt  that  there  are 
many  children  who  show  a  marked  preponderance  of  the 
one  or  of  the  other  tendency :  there  is  the  fanciful  and 
dreamy  child,  and  the  matter-of-fact  child  with  a  tenacious 
grasp  on  the  realities  of  things.  I  have  but  little  doubt, 
too,  that  in  the  case  of  children  who  show  the  two  tendencies, 
the  one  or  the  other  is  apt  to  preponderate  at  a  certain 
stage  of  development :  many  boys,  for  example,  have  their 
dreamy  period,  and  then  become  almost  stolidly  practical. 
All  that  I  am  concerned  to  make  out  here  is  that  the  two 
tendencies  do  co-exist,  and  as  a  number  of  parents  have 
assured  me  may  co-exist  each  in  a  high  degree  of  intensity 
in  the  same  child  ;  the  really  intelligent  children,  boys  as 
well  as  girls,  being  dispassionate  and  shrewd  inquirers  into 
the  make  of  thet  actual  world  while  ardently  engaged  in 
fashioning  a  brighter  one. 


THE   DAWN    OF   REASON.  65 

The  two  tendencies  belong  to  two  moods,  one  of  which 
may  be  regent  for  days  together,  though  they  often  alter- 
nate with  astonishing  rapidity.  More  particularly  the 
serious  matter-of-fact  mood  readily  passes,  as  if  in  relief 
from  mental  tension,  into  the  playful  fanciful  one,  as  when 
the  tiny  student,  deep  in  the  stupendous  lore  of  the 
spelling-book,  suddenly  dashes  off  to  some  fanciful  conceit 
suggested  by  the  '  funny  '  look  of  a  particular  word  or 
letter. 

The  child  not  only  observes  but  begins  to  reflect  on 
what  he  observes,  and  does  his  best  to  understand  the 
puzzling  scene  which  meets  his  eye.  And  all  this  gives 
seriousness,  a  deep  and  admirable  seriousness,  to  his 
attitude.  So  much  is  this  the  case  that  if  we  were  called  on 
to  portray  the  typical  mental  posture  of  the  child  we 
might  probably  do  so  by  drawing  the  erect  little  figure  of  a 
boy,  as  with  widely  open  eye  he  gazes  at  some  new  wonder, 
or  listens  to  some  new  report  of  his  surroundings  from  a 
mother's  lips.  Hence,  one  may  forgive  the  touch  of 
exaggeration  when  Mr.  Bret  Harte  writes :  "  All  those 
who  have  made  a  loving  study  of  the  young  human  animal 
will,  I  think,  admit  that  its  dominant  expression  is  gravity 
and  not  playfulness  ",l  We  may  now  turn  to  this  graver 
side  of  the  young  intelligence. 

Here,  again,  I  may  as  well  say  that  I  prefer  to  observe 
the  phenomenon  in  its  clearer  and  fuller  manifestations, 
that  is  to  say,  to  study  the  serious  intelligence  of  the  child 
in  the  most  intelligent  children,  or  at  least  in  children 
whose  minds  are  most  active.  This  does  not  mean  that 
we  shall  be  on  the  look-out  for  precocious  wisdom  or 
priggish  smartness.  On  the  contrary,  since  it  is  childish 
intelligence  as  such  that  we  are  in  search  of,  we  shall  take 
pains  to  avoid  as  far  as  possible  any  encounter  with  pro- 
digies. By  these  I  mean  the  unfortunate  little  people  whose 

1  Works,  vol.  iii.,  p.  396. 

5 


66  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

mental  limbs  have  been  twisted  out  of  beautiful  child- 
shape  by  the  hands  of  those  in  whom  the  better  instincts 
of  the  parent  have  been  outweighed  by  the  ambition  of 
the  showman.  We  shall  seek  more  particularly  for  spon- 
taneous openings  of  the  mental  flower  under  the  warming 
rays  of  a  true  mother's- love,  for  confidential  whisperings  of 
child-thought  to  her  ever-attentive  and  ever-tolerant  ear. 

In  order  fully  to  understand  the  serious  work  of  childish 
intelligence,  we  ought  to  begin  with  a  study  of  early  obser- 
vation. But  I  must  pass  by  this  interesting  subject  with 
only  a  remark  or  two. 

Much  has  been  written  on  the  deeply  concentrated  all- 
absorbing  scrutiny  of  things  by  the  young  eye.  But  to 
say  how  much  an  infant  of  nine  months  really  sees  when 
he  fixes  his  wide  eyes  on  some  new  object,  is  a  matter  of 
great  uncertainty.  What  seems  certain,  is  that  the  infant 
has  to  learn  to  see  things,  and  very  probably  takes  what 
seems  to  us  an  unnecessarily  long  time  to  see  them  at  all 
completely. 

We  find  when  the  child  grows  and  can  give  an 
account  of  what  he  notes  that  his  observation,  while 
often  surprisingly  minute  in  particular  directions,  is  highly 
restricted  as  to  its  directions,  being  narrowly  confined 
within  the  limits  of  a  few  dominant  attractions.  Thus  a 
child  will  sometimes  be  so  impressed  with  the  colour  of  an 
object  as  almost  to  ignore  its  form.  A  little  girl  of 
eighteen  months,  who  knew  lambs  and  called  them 
'  lammies,'  on  seeing  two  black  ones  in  a  field  among 
some  white  ones  called  out,  "  Eh  !  doggie,  doggie  !  "  The 
likeness  of  colour  to  the  black  dog  overpowered  the  like- 
ness in  form  to  the  other  lambs  close  by.  Within 
the  limits  of  form-perception  again,  we  may  remark 
the  tendency  to  a  one-sided  mode  of  observing  things 
which  has  in  it  something  of  an  abstract  quality.  For 
the  child  C.  the  pointed  head  was  the  main  essential 
feature  of  the  dog,  and  he  recognised  this  in  a  bit  of 


THE    DAWN   OF   REASON.  6/ 

biscuit.  We  shall  find  further  examples  of  this  abstract 
•observation  when  we  come  to  consider  children's  drawings. 

This  same  partiality  of  observation  comes  out  very 
clearly  in  a  good  deal  of  the  early  assimilation  or  apper- 
ception already  referred  to.  The  reason  why  it  is  so  easy 
for  a  child  to  superimpose  a  fanciful'  analogy  on  an  object 
of  sense,  is  that  his  mind  is  untroubled  by  all  the  com- 
plexity of  this  object.  It  fastens  on  some  salient  feature 
of  supreme  attractiveness  or  interest,  and  flies  away  on  the 
wings  of  this,  to  what  seems  to  us  a  far-off  resemblance. 

This  detaching  or  selective  activity  in  children's  obser- 
vation, which  in  a  manner  is  a  defect,  is  also  a  point  of 
superiority.  It  has  this  in  common  with  the  observation 
of  the  poet,  that  it  is  wholly  engrossed  with  what  is  valu- 
able. Thus  one  main  feature  of  the  eye-lid  is  certainly 
that  it  opens  and  closes  like  a  curtain  ;  and  it  is  its  re- 
semblance to  the  mysterious  curtain  shutting  out  the 
daylight,  which  makes  it  a  matter  of  absorbing  interest. 
Here,  then,  we  have,  as  we  shall  see  more  fully  presently, 
a  true  germ  of  thought-activity  embedded  in  the  very  process 
of  childish  observation  and  recognition.  For  thought  is 
precisely  a  more  methodical  process  of  bringing  the  con- 
crete object  into  its  relations  to  other  things. 

Yet  children's  observation  does  not  remain  at  this 
height  of  grand  selectiveness.  The  pressure  of  practical 
needs  tends  to  bring  it  down  to  our  familiar  level.  A  child 
finds  himself  compelled  to  distinguish  things  and  name 
them  as  others  do.  The  lamb  and  the  dog,  for  example, 
have  to  be  distinguished  by  a  complex  of  marks  in  which 
the  supremely  interesting  detail  of  colour  holds  a  quite 
subordinate  place.  Individual  things,  too,  have  to  be  dis- 
tinguished, if  only  for  the  purpose  of  drawing  the  line 
between  what  is  'mine'  and  'not  mine'.  The  boy's  mother, 
his  cup,  his  hat,  must  be  readily  recognised,  and  this  neces- 
sity forces  the  attention  to  grasp  a  plurality  of  marks. 
Thus  the  mother  cannot  always  be  recognised  by  her 


68  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

height  alone,  as  when  she  happens  to  be  sitting,  nor  by  her 
hair  alone,  as  when  she  happens  to  have  her  hat  on,  so  that 
the  weighty  problem  of  recognising  her  always  compels  the 
child  to  note  a  number  of  distinctive  marks,  some  of  which 
will  in  every  case  be  available. 

When  once  the  eye  has  begun  to  note  differences  it 
makes  rapid  progress.  This  is  particularly  true  where  the 
development  of  a  special  interest  in  a  group  of  things  leads 
to  a  habit  of  concentration.  Thus  little  boys  when  the 
« railway  interest '  seizes  them  are  apt  to  be  finely  observant 
of  the  differences  between  this  and  that  engine  and  so  forth. 
A  boy  aged  two  years  and  eleven  months,  after  travelling 
from  Dublin  to  Cork,  and  thence  by  another  railway,  asked 
his  mother  if  she  had  noticed  the  difference  in  the  make  of 
the  rails  on  the  two  lines.  Of  course  she  had  not,  though 
she  afterwards' ascertained  that  there  was  a  slight  difference 
which  the  boy's  keener  eye  had  detected. 

The  fineness  of  a  child's  distinguishing  observation  is 
well  illustrated  in  his  recognition  of  small  drawings  and 
photographs,  as  when  a  child  of  two  will  pick  out  the  like- 
ness of  his  father  from  a  small  carte  de  visite  group.  But 
this  side  of  children's  recognition  will  occupy  us  later  on. 

Such  fine  and  ready  recognition  as  that  just  illustrated 
shows  not  merely  a  penetrating  observation  of  what  is- 
distinctive  and  characteristic,  but  also  a  measure  of  a  higher 
power,  that  of  seizing  in  one  act  of  attention  a  complex  or 
group  of  such  marks.  In  truth,  children's  observation,  when 
close  and  methodical,  as  it  is  apt  to  be  under  the  stimulus 
of  a  powerful  interest,  is  often  surprisingly  full  as  well  as 
exact.  The  boy,  John  Ruskin,  was  not  the  only  one  who 
could  look  for  hours  together  at  such  an  object  as  flowing 
water,  noting  all  its  changing  features.  A  mother  writes 
to  me  that  her  boy,  when  three  and  a  half  years  old,  re- 
ceived a  picture-book,  '  The  Railway  Train,'  and  looked 
at  it  almost  uninterruptedly  for  a  week,  retaining  it  even  at 
meals.  "  At  the  end  of  this  time  he  had  grasped  the  smallest 


THE   DAWN    OF   REASON.  69 

detail  in  every  picture."  By  such  occasional  fits  of  fine 
•exhaustive  inspection,  a  child  of  the  more  intelligent  sort 
will  now  and  again  come  surprisingly  near  that  higher  type 
of  observation,  at  once  minute  and  comprehensive,  which 
subserves,  in  somewhat  different  ways,  scientific  discovery 
and  artistic  representation.  Many  parents  when  watching 
these  exceptional  heights  of  childish  scrutiny  have  indulged 
in  fond  dreams  of  future  greatness.  Yet  these  achievements 
are,  alas,  often  limited  to  a  certain  stage  of  intellectual  pro- 
gress, and  are  apt  to  disappear  when  the  bookish  days  come 
on,  and  the  child  loses  himself  hours  together  over  his  favour- 
ite stories.  And  in  any  case  the  germ  of  promise  must  pos- 
sess a  wondrous  vitality  if  it  resists  all  the  efforts  of  our 
school-system  to  weed  out  from  the  garden  of  the  mind 
anything  so  profitless  as  an  observing  faculty. 

Next  to  this  work  of  observation  we  must  include  in 
the  pre-conditions  of  childish  thought  at  its  best  a  lively 
retention  of  what  is  observed.  Everybody  who  has  talked 
much  with  little  children  must  have  been  struck  by  the 
tenacity  of  their  memories,  their  power  of  recalling  after 
considerable  intervals  small  features  of  an  object  or  small 
incidents  which  others  hardly  noted,  or,  if  they  noted  them  at 
the  time,  have  since  forgotten.  Stories  of  this  surprising  recol- 
lection may  be  obtained  in  abundance.  A  little  girl  when 
only  nine  months  old  was  on  a  walk  shown  some  lambs  at 
the  gate  of  a  field.  On  being  taken  the  same  road  three 
weeks  later  she  surprised  her  mother  by  calling  out  just 
before  arriving  at  the  gate  '  Baa,  baa  ! '  Later  on  children 
will  remember  through  much  longer  intervals.  A  little  boy 
aged  two  years  and  ten  months  when  taken  to  Italy  a 
second  time  after  four  or  five  months'  absence,  remembered 
the  smallest  details,  e.g.,  how  the  grapes  were  cut,  how  the 
wine  was  made  and  so  forth. 

The  gradual  gathering  of  a  store  of  such  clear  memory- 
images  is  a  necessary  preliminary  to  reflexion  and  thought. 
It  is  because  the  child  remembers  as  well  as  sees,  remember- 


7O  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

ing  even  while  he  sees,  that  he  grows  thoughtful,  inquiring 
about  the  meaning  and  reason  of  this  and  that,  or  boldly 
venturing  on  some  explanation  of  his  own.  And  just  as 
the  child's  mind  must  take  on  many  pictures  of  things  before 
it  reflects  upon  and  tries  to  understand  the  world,  so  it 
must  collect  and  arrange  pictures  of  the  successive  scenes 
and  events  of  its  life,  before  it  will  grow  self-conscious  and 
reflect  upon  its  own  strange  existence. 

The  only  other  pre-condition  of  this  primitive  thought- 
fulness  is  that  imaginative  activity  which  we  have  already 
considered  on  its  playful  and  pleasurable  side.  We  are 
learning  at  last  that  the  inventive  phantasy  of  a  child, 
prodigal  as  it  is  of  delightful  illusions,  is  also  a  valuable 
contributor  to  this  sober  work  of  thought.  It  is  just 
because  the  young  mind  is  so  mobile  and  agile,  passing  far 
beyond  the  narrow  confines  of  the  actual  in  imaginative 
conjecture  of  what  lies  hidden  in  the  remote,  that  it  begins 
to  think,  that  is,  to  reason  about  the  causes  of  things.  In 
the  history  of  the  individual  as  of  the  race,  thought,  even 
the  abstract  thought  of  science,  grows  out  of  the  free  play 
of  imagination.  The  myth  is  at  once  a  picturesque  fancy, 
and  a  crude  attempt  at  an  explanation.  This  primitive 
thought  is  indeed  so  compact  of  bright  picturesque  imagery 
that  we  with  our  scientifically  trained  minds  might  easily 
overlook  its  inherent  thoughtfulness.  Yet  a  close  inspection 
shows  us  that  it  contains  the  essential  characteristics  of 
thought,  an  impulse  to  comprehend  things,  to  reduce  the 
confusing  multiplicity  to  order  and  system. 

We  must  not  hope  to  trace  clearly  the  lines  of  this  first 
child-thought.  The  earliest  attitude  of  the  wakening  in- 
telligence towards  the  confusion  of  novelties,  which  for  us 
has  become  a  world,  is  presumably  indescribable,  and 
further,  by  the  time  that  a  child  comes  to  the  use  of  words 
and  can  communicate  his  thoughts,  in  a  broken  way  at  least, 
the  scene  is  already  losing  something  of  its  first  strangeness, 
the  organising  work  of  experience  has  begun.  Yet  though 


THE    DAWN    OF   REASON.  /I 

we  cannot  expect  to  get  back  to  the  primal  wonderment  we 
can  catch  glimpses  of  that  later  wonderment  which  arises 
when  instruction  supplements  the  senses,  and  ideas  begin 
to  form  themselves  of  a  vast  unknown  in  space  and  time, 
of  the  changefulness  of  things,  and  of  that  mystery  of 
mysteries  the  beginning  of  things.  The  study  of  this 
child-thought  as  it  tries  to  utter  itself  in  our  clumsy  speech 
will  well  repay  us.  Only  we  must  be  ever  on  the  alert  lest 
we  read  too  much  into  these  early  utterances,  forgetting 
that  the  child's  first  tentative  use  of  words  is  very  apt  to 
mislead. 

The  child  first  dimly  reveals  himself  as  thinker  in  the 
practical  domain.  In  the  evolution  of  the  race  the  reason- 
ing faculty  has  been  first  quickened  into  action  by 
the  ferment  of  instinctive  craving  and  striving.  Man 
began  to  reflect  on  the  connexions  of  things  in  order  to 
supply  himself  with  food,  to  ward  off  cold  and  other  evils. 
So  with  the  child.  Before  the  age  of  speech  we  may  ob- 
serve him  thinking  out  rapidly  as  occasion  arises  some 
new  practical  expedient,  as,  for  example,  seizing  a  clothes- 
pin or  other  available  aid  in  order  to  reach  a  toy  that  has 
slipped  out  of  his  reach ;  or  clutching  at  our  dress 
and  pulling  the  chair  by  way  of  signifying  to  us  that  we 
are  to  remain  and  continue  to  amuse  him.  The  observa- 
tions of  the  first  months  of  child-life  abound  with  such 
illustrations  of  an  initiating  practical  intelligence. 

Yet  these  exploits,  impressive  as  they  often  are,  hardly 
disclose  the  distinctive  attributes  of  the  human  thinker. 
The  cat,  without  any  example  to  imitate,  will  find  its  way 
to  a  quite  charming  begging  gesture  by  reaching  up  and 
tapping  your  arm. 

Probably  the  earliest  unambiguous  indication  of  a 
human  faculty  of  thought  is  to  be  found  in  infantile  com- 
parison. When  a  baby  turns  its  head  deliberately  and 
sagely  from  a  mirror-reflexion  or  portrait  of  its  mother  to 
the  original,  we  appear  to  see  the  first  crude  beginnings  of 


72  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

a  process  which,  when  more  elaborated,  becomes  human 
understanding. 

A  good  deal  of  comparison  of  this  kind  seems  to  enter 
into  the  mental  activity  of  young  children.  Thus  the  deep 
absorbing  attention  to  pictures  spoken  of  above  commonly 
means  a  careful  comparison  of  this  and  that  form  one  with 
another,  and  in  certain  cases,  at  least,  a  comparison  of  what 
is  now  seen  with  the  mental  image  of  the  original.  In 
some  children,  moreover,  comparison  under  the  form  of 
measurement  grows  into  a  sort  of  craze.  They  want  to 
measure  the  height  of  things  one  with  another  and  so  forth. 
An  intelligent  child  will  even  find  his  way  to  a  mediate 
form  of  comparison,  that  is,  to  measuring  things  through  the 
medium  of  a  third  thing.  Thus  a  boy  of  five,  who  had 
conceived  a  strong  liking  for  dogs,  was  in  the  habit  when 
walking  out  of  measuring  on  his  body  how  high  a  dog 
reached.  On  returning  home  he  would  compare  this  height 
with  that  of  the  seat  or  back  of  a  chair,  and  would  finally 
ask  for  a  yard  measure  and  find  out  the  number  of  inches. 

This  comparison  of  things  is  of  the  very  essence  of 
understanding,  of  comprehending  things  as  distinguished 
from  merely  apprehending  them  as  concrete  isolated  ob- 
jects. The  child  in  his  desire  to  assimilate,  to  find  some- 
thing in  the  region  of  the  known  with  which  the  new  and 
strange  thing  may  be  brought  into  kinship,  is  ever  on  the 
look-out  for  likeness.  Hence  the  analogical  and  half-poetical 
apperception  of  things,  the  metaphorical  reduction  of  a 
thing  to  a  prototype,  as  in  calling  a  star  an  eye,  or  an  eye- 
lid a  curtain,  may  be  said  to  contain  the  germ  at  once  of 
poetry  and  of  science. 

This  comparison  for  purposes  of  understanding  leads 
on  to  what  psychologists  call  classification,  or  generalisa- 
tion ;  the  bringing  together  and  keeping  before  the  mind  of 
a  number  of  like  things  by  help  of  a  general  name.  The 
child  may  be  said  to  become  a  true  thinker  as  soon  as 
he  uses  names  intelligently,  calling  each  thing  by  an 
appropriate  name,  and  so  classing  it  with  its  kind. 


THE   DAWN    OF   REASON.  73 

This  power  of  infantile  generalisation  is  one  full  of 
interest  and  has  been  carefully  observed.  It  will,  however, 
be  more  conveniently  dealt  with  in  another  chapter  where 
we  shall  be  specially  concerned  with  the  child's  use  of 
language. 

While  thus  beginning  to  arrange  things  according  to 
such  points  of  likeness  as  he  can  discover,  the  child  is 
noting  the  connexions  of  things.  He  finds  out  what 
belongs  to  a  horse,  to  a  locomotive  engine,  he  notes  when 
father  leaves  home  and  returns,  when  the  sun  declines, 
what  accompanies  and  follows  rain,  and  so  forth.  That 
is  to  say,  he  is  feeling  his  way  to  the  idea  of  connectedness, 
of  regularity,  of  what  we  call  uniformity  or  law.  We  now 
say  that  the  child  reasons,  no  longer  blindly  or  automatic- 
ally like  the  dog,  but  with  a  consciousness  of  what  he  is 
doing.  We  little  think  how  much  hard  work  has  to  be  got 
through  by  the  little  brain  before  even  this  dim  perception 
of  regularity  is  attained.  In  some  things,  no  doubt,  the 
regularity  is  patent  enough,  and  can  hardly  be  overlooked 
by  the  dullest  of  children.  The  connexion  between  the 
laying  of  the  cloth  and  the  meal — at  least  in  an  orderly 
home — is  a  matter  which  even  the  canine  and  the  feline 
intelligence  is  quite  able  to  grasp.  But  when  it  comes  to 
finding  out  the  law  according  to  which,  say,  his  face  gets 
dirty,  his  head  aches,  or  people  send  out  their  invitations 
to  children's  parties,  the  matter  is  not  so  simple. 

The  fact  is  that  there  is  so  large  a  proportion  of  appar- 
ent disconnectedness  and  capricious  irregularity  in  the 
child's  world  that  it  is  hard  to  see  how  he  would  ever  learn 
to  understand  and  to  reason,  were  he  not  endowed  with 
a  lively  and  inextinguishable  impulse  to  connect  and 
simplify.  Herein  lies  a  part  of  the  pathos  of  childhood.  It 
brings  its  naive  prepossession  of  a  regular  well-ordered 
world,  and  alas,  finds  itself  confronted  with  an  impenetrable 
tangle  of  disorder.  How  quaint  it  is  to  listen  to  the  little 
thinker,  as,  with  untroubled  brow,  he  begins  to  propound  his 


74  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

beautifully  simple  theory  of  the  cosmic  order.  An  Ameri- 
can boy  of  ten  who  had  had  one  cross  small  teacher,  and 
whose  best  teacher  had  been  tall,  accosted  a  new  teacher 
thus:  "I'm  afraid  you'll  make  a  cross  teacher".  His 
teacher  replied:  "Why,  am  I  cross?"  To  which  he  re- 
joined :  "  No  ;  but  you  are  so  small  ".  We  call  this  hasty 
generalisation.  We  might  with  equal  propriety  term  it  the 
child's  innate  a  priori  view  of  things. 

With  this  eagerness  to  get  at  and  formulate  the  law  of 
things  is  inseparably  bound  up  the  impulse  to  bring  every 
new  occurrence  under  some  general  rule.  Here,  too,  the 
small  thinker  may  only  too  easily  slip  by  failing  to  see  the 
exact  import  and  scope  of  the  rule.  We  see  this  in  the 
extension  of  laws  of  human  experience  to  the  animal  world. 
Rules  supplied  by  others  and  only  vaguely  understood, 
more  particularly  moral  and  religious  truths,  lend  them- 
selves to  this  kind  of  misapplication.  The  Worcester 
collection  of  Thoughts  and  Reasonings  of  Children  gives 
some  odd  examples  of  such  application.  American  children, 
to  judge  from  these  examples,  appear  to  be  particularly 
smart  at  quoting  Scripture;  not  altogether,  one  suspects, 
without  a  desire  to  show  off,  and  possibly  to  raise  a  laugh. 
But  discounting  the  influence  of  such  motives  it  seems 
pretty  clear  that  a  child  has  a  marvellous  power  of  reading 
his  own  ideas  into  others'  words,  and  so  of  giving  them  a 
turn  which  is  apt  to  stagger  their  less-gifted  authors.  Here 
is  a  case.  R.'s  aunt  said  :  "  You  are  so  restless,  R.,  I  can't 
hold  you  any  longer  ".  R. :  "  Cast  your  burden  on  the  Lord, 
Aunty  K.,  and  He  will  sustain  you  ".  The  child,  we  are 
told,  was  only  four.  He  probably  understood  the  Scripture 
injunction  as  a  useful  prescription  for  getting  rid  of  a 
nuisance,  and  with  the  admirable  impartiality  of  childish 
logic  at  once  applied  it  to  himself.  Other  illustrations  of 
such  misapplication  will  meet  us  when  we  take  up  the 
relation  of  the  child's  thought  to  language. 


THE   DAWN    OF   REASON.  75 

The  Questioning  Age. 

The  child's  first  vigorous  effort  to  understand  the 
things  about  him  may  be  roughly  dated  at  the  end  of  the 
third  year,  and  it  is  noteworthy  that  this  synchronises  with 
the  advent  of  the  questioning  age.  The  first  putting  of  a 
question  occurred  in  the  case  of  Preyer's  boy  in  the  twenty- 
eighth  month,  in  that  of  Pollock's  girl  in  the  twenty-third 
month.  But  the  true  age  of  inquisitiveness  when  question 
after  question  is  fired  off  with  wondrous  rapidity  and  per- 
tinacity seems  to  be  ushered  in  with  the  fourth  year. 

A  common  theory  peculiarly  favoured  by  ignorant 
nurses  and  mothers  is  that  children's  questioning  is  a 
studied  annoyance.  The  child  has  come  to  the  use  of 
words,  and  with  all  a  child's  '  cussedness '  proceeds  to  tor- 
ment the  ears  of  those  about  him.  There  are  signs,  how- 
ever, of  a  change  of  view  on  this  point.  The  fact  that  the 
questioning  follows  on  the  heels  of  the  reasoning  impulse 
might  tell  us  that  it  is  connected  with  the  throes  which  the 
young  understanding  has  to  endure  in  its  first  collision  with 
a  tough  and  baffling  world.  The  question  is  the  outcome 
of  ignorance  coupled  with  a  belief  in  the  boundless  know- 
ledge of  grown-up  people.  It  is  an  attempt  to  add  to  the 
scrappy,  unsatisfying  information  about  things  which  the 
little  questioner's  own  observation  has  managed  to  gather, 
or  others'  half-understood  words  have  succeeded  in  com- 
municating. It  is  the  outcome  of  intellectual  craving,  of  a 
demand  for  mental  food.  But  it  is  much  more  than  an  ex- 
pression of  need.  Just  as  the  child's  articulate  demand  for 
food  implies  that  he  knows  what  food  is,  and  that  it  is 
obtainable,  so  the  question  implies  that  the  little  questioner 
knows  what  he  needs,  and  in  what  direction  to  look  for  it. 
The  simplest  form  of  question,^.,"  What  is  this  flower?"  "this 
insect?"  shows  that  the  child  by  a  half-conscious  process  of 
reflexion  and  reasoning  has  found  his  way  to  the  truth  that 
things  have  their  qualities,  their  belongings,  their  names. 
Many  questions,  indeed,  e.g.,  '  Has  the  moon  wings  ? ' 


76  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

*  Where  do  all  the  days  go  to  ? '  reveal   a  true  process  of 
childish  thought  and  have  a  high  value  as  expressions  of 
this  thought. 

Questioning  may  take  various  directions.  A  good  deal 
of  the  child's  catechising  of  his  long-suffering  mother  is 
prompted  by  thirst  for  fact.1  The  typical  form  of  this  line 
of  questioning  is  '  What  ? '  The  motive  here  is  to  gain 
possession  of  some  fact  which  will  connect  itself  with  and 
supplement  a  fact  already  known.  'How  old  is  Rover?' 
'Where  was  Rover  born? '  'Who  was  his  father?'  'What 
is  that  dog's  name?'  'What  sort  of  hair  had  you  when 
you  were  a  little  girl? '  These  are  samples  of  the  question- 
ing activity  by  help  of  which  the  little  inquirer  tries  to 
make  up  his  connected  wholes,  to  see  things  with  his 
imagination  in  their  proper  attachment  and  order.  And 
how  greedily  and  pertinaciously  the  small  folk  will  follow 
up  their  questioning,  flying  as  it  often  looks  wildly  enough 
from  point  to  point,  yet  gathering  from  every  answer  some 
new  contribution  to  their  ideas  of  things.  A  boy  of  three 
years  and  nine  months  would  thus  attack  his  mother: 

*  What  does  frogs  eat,  and  mice  and  birds  and  butterflies  ? 
and  what  does  they  do  ?  and  what  is  their  names  ?     What 
is  all    their  houses'  names  ?      What  does  they  call    their 
streets  and  places  ?  '  etc.,  etc. 

Such  questions  easily  appear  foolish  because,  as  in  the 
case  just  quoted,  they  are  directed  by  quaint  childish 
fancies.  The  child's  anthropomorphic  way  of  looking  out 
on  the  world  leads  him  to  assimilate  animal  to  human 
ways. 

One  feature  in  this  fact-gleaning  kind  of  question  is 
the  great  store  which  the  child  sets  by  the  name  of  a 
thing.  M.  Compayre'  has  pointed  out  that  the  form  of 
question :  '  What  is  this  ? '  often  means,  "  What  is  it 

1  The  first  question  put  by  Preyer's  boy  was, '  Where  is  mamma  ?  ' 
Die  Seele  des  Kindes,  p.  412.  (The  references  are  to  the  third  edition, 
1890.) 


THE   DAWN   OF   REASON.  77 

called  ? "  The  child's  unformulated  theory  seems  to  be 
that  everything  has  its  own  individual  name.  The  little 
boy  just  spoken  of  explained  to  his  mother  that  he  thought 
all  the  frogs,  the  mice,  the  birds,  and  the  butterflies  had 
names  given  to  them  by  their  mothers  as  he  himself  had. 
Perhaps  this  was  only  a  way  of  expressing  the  childish 
idea  that  everything  has  its  name,  primordial  and  un- 
changeable. 

A  second  direction  of  this  early  questioning  is  towards 
the  reason  and  the  cause  of  things.  The  typical  form  is 
here  '  why  ?  '  This  form  of  inquiry  occurred  in  the  case  of 
Preyer's  boy  at  the  age  of  two  years  forty-three  weeks. 
But  it  becomes  the  all-predominant  form  of  question 
somewhat  later.  Who  that  has  tried  to  instruct  the  small 
child  of  three  or  four  does  not  know  the  long  shrill  whine- 
like  sound  of  this  question  ?  This  form  of  question 
develops  naturally  out  of  the  earlier,  for  to  give  the 
'  what  ? '  of  a  thing,  that  is  its  connexions,  is  to  give  its 
'  why  ? '  that  is  its  mode  of  production,  its  use  and  purpose. 

Nothing  perhaps  in  child  utterance  is  better  worth 
interpreting,  hardly  anything  more  difficult  to  interpret, 
than  this  simple-looking  little  '  why?' 

We  ourselves  perhaps  do  not  use  the  word  '  why  '  and 
its  correlative  '  because  '  with  one  clear  meaning  ;  and  the 
child's  first  use  of  the  words  is  largely  imitative.  What 
may  be  pretty  safely  asserted  is  that  even  in  the  most 
parrot-like  and  wearisome  iteration  of 'why?'  and  its 
equivalents  '  what  for  ? '  etc.,  the  child  shows  a  dim  re- 
cognition of  the  truth  that  a  thing  is  understandable,  that 
it  has  its  reasons  if  only  they  can  be  found. 

Let  us  in  judging  of  this  pitiless  '  why  ?  '  try  to  under- 
stand the  situation  of  the  young  mind  confronted  by  so 
much  that  is  strange  and  unassimilated,  meeting  by  obser- 
vation and  hearsay  with  new  and  odd  occurrences  every 
day.  The  strange  things  standing  apart  from  his  tiny 
familiar  world,  the  wide  region  of  the  quaint  and  puzzling 


78  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

in  animal  ways,  for  example,  stimulate  the  instinct  to 
appropriate,  to  master.  The  little  thinker  must  try  at 
least  to  bring  the  new  odd  thing  into  some  recognisable 
relation  to  his  familiar  world.  And  what  is  more  natural 
than  to  go  to  the  wise  lips  of  the  grown-up  person  for  a 
solution  of  the  difficulty  ?  The  fundamental  significance 
of  the  '  why  ?  '  in  the  child's  vocabulary,  then,  is  the  neces- 
sity of  connecting  new  with  old,  of  illuminating  what  is 
strange  and  dark  by  light  reflected  from  what  is  already 
matter  of  knowledge.  And  a  child's  '  why  ? '  is  often 
temporarily  satisfied  by  supplying  from  the  region  of  the 
familiar  an  analogue  to  the  new  and  unclassed  fact.  Thus 
his  impulse  to  understand  why  pussy  has  fur,  is  met  by 
telling  him  that  it  is  pussy's  hair. 

It  is  only  a  step  further  in  the  same  direction  when  the 
'  why  ?  '  has  to  be  met  by  supplying  a  general  statement ; 
for  to  refer  the  particular  to  a  general  rule  is  a  more 
perfect  and  systematic  kind  of  assimilation.  Now  we 
know  that  children  are  very  susceptible  to  the  authority 
of  precedent,  custom,  general  rule.  Just  as  in  children's 
ethics  customary  permission  makes  a  thing  right,  so  in 
their  logic  the  truth  that  a  thing  generally  happens  may  be 
said  to  supply  a  reason  for  its  happening  in  a  particular 
case.  Hence,  when  the  much-abused  nurse  answers  the 
child's  question,  '  Why  is  the  pavement  hard  ?  '  by  saying, 
'  Because  pavement  is  always  hard,'  she  is  perhaps  less 
open  to  the  charge  of  giving  a  woman's  reason  than  is 
sometimes  said.1  In  sooth  the  child's  queries,  his  search- 
ings  for  explanation,  are,  as  already  suggested,  prompted 
by  the  desire  for  order  and  connectedness.  And  this 
means  that  he  wants  the  general  rule  to  which  he  can 
assimilate  the  particular  and  as  yet  isolated  fact. 

From  the  first,  however,  the  '  why  ? '  and  its  congeners 
have  reference  to  the  causal  idea,  to  something  which  has 
brought  the  new  and  strange  thing  into  existence  and  made 

1  Cf.  some  shrewd  remarks  by  Dr.  Venn,  Empirical  Logic,  p.  494. 


THE   DAWN   OF   REASON.  79 

it  what  it  is.  In  truth  this  reference  to  origin,  to  bringing 
about  or  making,  is  exceedingly  prominent  in  children's 
questionings.  Nothing  is  more  interesting  to  a  child  than 
the  production  of  things.  What  hours  and  hours  does  he 
not  spend  in  wondering  how  the  pebbles,  the  stones,  the 
birds,  the  babies  are  made.  This  vivid  interest  in  produc- 
tion is  to  a  considerable  extent  practical.  It  is  one  of  the 
great  joys  of  children  to  be  able  themselves  to  make  things, 
and  this  desire  to  fashion,  which  is  probably  at  first 
quite  immense,  and  befitting  rather  a  god  than  a  feeble 
mannikin  of  three  years,  naturally  leads  on  to  inquiry 
into  the  mode  of  producing.  Yet  from  the  earliest  a 
true  speculative  interest  blends  with  this  practical  instinct. 
Children  are  in  the  complete  sense  little  philosophers,  if 
philosophy,  as  the  ancients  said,  consists  in  knowing  the 
causes  of  things.  This  discovery  of  the  cause  is  the 
completed  process  of  assimilation,  of  the  reference  of  the 
particular  to  a  general  rule  or  law. 

This  inquiry  into  origin  and  mode  of  production 
starts  with  the  amiable  presupposition  that  all  things  have 
been  hand-produced  after  the  manner  of  household  posses- 
sions. The  world  is  a  sort  of  big  house  where  everything 
has  been  made  by  somebody,  or  at  least  fetched  from  some- 
where. This  application  of  the  anthropomorphic  idea  of 
fashioning  follows  the  law  of  all  childish  thought,  that  the 
unknown  is  assimilated  to  the  known.  The  one  mode  of 
origin  which  the  embryo  thinker  is  really  and  directly 
familiar  with  is  the  making  of  things.  He  himself  makes 
a  respectable  number  of  things,  including  these  rents  in  his 
clothes,  messes  on  the  tablecloth,  and  the  like,  which  he 
gets  firmly  imprinted  on  his  memory  by  the  authorities. 
And,  then,  he  takes  a  keen  interest  in  watching  the  making 
of  things  by  others,  such  as  puddings,  clothes,  houses,  hay- 
ricks. To  ask,  then,  who  made  the  animals,  the  babies,  the 
wind,  the  clouds,  and  so  forth,  is  for  him  merely  to  apply 
the  more  familiar  type  of  causation  as  norm  or  rule. 


80  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

Similarly  in  all  questions  as  to  the  '  whence? '  of  things,  as  in 
asking  whether  babies  were  bought  in  a  shop. 

The  '  why  ? '  takes  on  a  more  special  meaning  when  the 
idea  of  purpose  becomes  clear.  The  search  now  is  for  the 
end,  what  philosophers  call  the  teleological  cause  or  reason. 
When,  for  example,  a  child  asks  'Why  does  the  wind  blow?' 
he  means,  'What  is  its  object  in  blowing?'  or  '  Of  what  use 
is  the  blowing  of  the  wind  ?  ' 

The  idea  underlying  the  common  form  of  the  '  why  ?  ' 
interrogative  deserves  a  moment's  inspection.  A  child's 
view  of  causation  starts  like  other  ideas  from  his  most 
familiar  experiences.  He  soon  finds  out  that  his  own 
actions  are  controlled  by  the  desire  to  get  or  to  avoid 
something,  that,  to  speak  in  rather  technical  language,  the 
idea  of  the  result  of  the  action  precedes  and  determines 
this  action. 

I  have  lately  come  across  a  very  early,  and  as  I  think, 
remarkable  illustration  of  this  form  of  childish  thought. 
A  little  girl  already  quoted,  whom  we  will  call  M., 
when  one  year  eleven  months  old,  happened  to  be  walking 
with  her  mother  on  a  windy  day.  At  first  she  was  de- 
lighted at  the  strong  boisterous  wind,  but  then  got  tired 
and  said  :  '  Wind  make  mamma's  hair  untidy,  Babba  (her 
own  name)  make  mamma's  hair  tidy,  so  wind  not  blow 
adain  (again) '.  About  three  weeks  later  this  child  was 
out  in  the  rain,  when  she  said  to  her  mother :  '  Mamma,  dy 
(dry)  Babba's  hands,  so  not  rain  any  more '.  What  does 
this  curious  inversion  of  the  order  of  cause  and  effect  mean  ? 
I  am  disposed  to  think  that  this  little  girl,  who  was  un- 
usually bright  and  intelligent,  was  transferring  to  nature's 
phenomena  the  forms  of  her  own  experience.  When  she 
is  disorderly,  and  her  mother  or  nurse  arranges  her  hair 
or  washes  her  hands,  it  is  in  order  that  she  may  not 
continue  to  be  disorderly.  The  child  is  envisaging  the 
wind  and  the  rain  as  a  kind  of  naughty  child  who  can 
be  got  to  behave  properly  by  effacing  the  effects  of  its 


THE    DAWN    OF   REASON.  8 1 

naughtiness.  In  other  words  they  are  both  to  be  deterred 
from  repeating  what  is  objectionable  by  a  visible  and 
striking  manifestation  of  somebody's  objection  or  prohibi- 
tion. Here,  it  seems  unmistakable,  we  have  a  projection 
into  nature  of  human  purpose,  of  the  idea  of  determination 
of  action  by  end  :  we  have  a  form  of  anthropomorphism 
which  runs  through  the  whole  of  primitive  thought 

It  seems  to  follow  from  this  that  there  is  a  stage  in  the 
development  of  a  child's  intelligence  when  questions  such 
as,  '  Why  do  the  leaves  fall  ? '  '  Why  does  the  thunder 
make  such  a  noise  ?  '  are  answered  most  satisfactorily  by 
a  poetic  fiction,  by  saying,  for  example,  that  the  leaves  are 
old  and  tired  of  hanging  on  to  the  trees,  and  that  the  thunder 
giant  is  in  a  particularly  bad  temper  and  making  a  noise. 
It  is  perhaps  permissible  to  make  use  of  this  fiction  at 
times,  more  especially  when  trying  to  answer  the  untiring 
questioning  about  animals  and  their  doings,  a  region  of 
existence,  by  the  way,  of  which  even  the  wisest  of  us  knows 
exceedingly  little.  Yet  the  device  has  its  risks  ;  and  an 
ill-considered  piece  of  myth-making  passed  off  as  an 
answer  may  find  itself  awkwardly  confronted  by  that 
most  merciless  of  things,  a  child's  logic. 

We  may  notice  something  more  in  this  early  mode  of 
interrogation.  Children  are  apt  to  think  not  only  that 
things  behave  in  general  after  our  manner,  that  their 
activity  is  determined  by  some  end  or  purpose,  or  that  they 
have  their  useful  function,  their  raison  d'etre  as  we  say, 
but  that  this  purpose  concerns  us  human  creatures.  The 
wind  and  the  rain  came  and  went  in  our  little  girl's  nature- 
theory  just  to  vex  or  out  of  consideration  for  '  mamma ' 
and  '  Babba  '.  A  little  boy  of  two  years  two  months  sitting 
on  the  floor  one  day  in  a  bad  temper  looked  up  and  saw  the 
sun  shining  and  said  captiously,  '  Sun  not  look  at  Hennie,"* 
and  then  more  pleadingly,  '  Please,  sun,  not  look  at  poor 
Hennie'.1  The  sea,  when  the  child  C.  first  saw  it,  was 

1  See  note  by  E.  M.  Stevens,  Mind,  xi.,  p.  150. 

6 


82  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

supposed  to  make  its  disturbing  noise  with  special  reference 
to  his  small  ears.  We  may  call  this  the  anthropocentric 
idea,  the  essence  of  which  is  that  man  is  the  centre  of 
reference,  the  aim  or  target,  in  all  nature's  processes.  This 
anthropocentric  tendency  again  is  shared  by  the  child 
with  the  uncultured  adult.  Primitive  man  looks  on  wind, 
rain,  thunder  as  sent  by  some  angry  spirit,  and  even  a 
respectable  English  farmer  tends  to  view  these  operations 
of  nature  in  much  the  same  way.  In  children  this  anthro- 
pocentric impulse  is  apt  to  get  toned  down  by  their 
temperament,  which  is  on  the  whole  optimistic  and  de- 
cidedly practical,  into  a  looking  out  for  the  uses  of  things. 
A  boy,  already  quoted,  once  (towards  the  end  of  the  fourth 
year)  asked  his  mother  what  the  bees  do.  This  question 
he  explained  by  adding  :  "  What  is  the  good  of  them  ?  " 
When  told  that  they  made  honey  he  observed  pertinently 
enough  from  his  teleological  standpoint :  "  Then  do  they 
bring  it  for  us  to  eat  ?  "  This  shrewd  little  fellow  might 
have  made  short  work  of  some  of  the  arguments  by  which 
the  theological  optimists  of  the  last  century  were  wont  to 
'  demonstrate '  the  Creator's  admirable  adaptation  of  nature 
to  man's  wants. 

The  frequency  of  this  kind  of  '  why  ? '  suggests  that 
children's  thoughts  about  things  are  penetrated  with  the 
idea  of  purpose  and  use.  This  is  shown  too  in  other 
ways.  M.  A.  Binet  found  by  questioning  children  that 
their  ideas  of  things  are  largely  made  up  of  uses.  Thus, 
asked  what  a  hat  is,  a  child  answered  :  "  Pour  mettre  sur 
la  tete".  Mr.  H.  E.  Kratz  of  Sioux  City  sends  me  some 
answers  to  questions  by  children  of  five  on  entering  a 
primary  school,  which  illustrate  the  same  point.  Thus 
the  question,  '  What  is  a  tree  ? '  brings  out  the  answers, 
'  To  make  the  wind  blow,'  '  To  sit  under,'  and  so  forth. 

Little  by  little  this  idea  of  a  definite  purpose  and  use 
in  this  and  that  thing  falls  back  and  the  child  gets  inter- 
ested more  in  the  production  or  origination  of  things.  He 


THE   DAWN    OF   REASON.  83 

wants  to  know  who  made  the  trees,  the  birds,  the  stars  and 
so  forth.  Here,  though  what  we  call  efficient,  as  distin- 
guished from  final,  cause  is  recognised,  anthropomorphism 
survives  in  the  idea  of  a  maker  analogous  to  the  carpenter. 
We  shall  see  later  that  children  habitually  envisage  the 
deity  as  a  fabricator. 

All  this  rage  of  questioning  about  the  uses  and  the 
origin  of  things  is  the  outcome,  not  merely  of  ignorance  and 
curiosity,  but  of  a  deeper  motive,  a  sense  of  perplexity,  of 
mystery  or  contradiction.  It  is  not  always  easy  to  dis- 
tinguish the  two  types  of  question,  yet  in  many  cases  at 
least  its  form  and  the  manner  of  putting  it  will  tell  us  that 
it  issues  from  a  puzzled  and  temporarily  baffled  brain.  As 
long  as  the  questioning  goes  on  briskly  we  may  infer  that 
a.  child  believes  in  the  possibility  of  knowledge,  and  has 
not  sounded  the  deepest  depths  of  intellectual  despair.  More 
pathetic  than  the  saddest  of  questions  is  the  silencing  of 
questions  by  the  loss  of  faith. 

It  is  easy  to  see  that  children  must  find  themselves 
puzzled  with  much  which  they  see  and  hear  of.  The 
apparent  exceptions  to  rules  don't  trouble  the  grown-up 
persons  just  because  as  recurrent  exceptions  they  seem  to 
take  on  a  rule  of  their  own.  Thus  adults  though  quite 
unversed  in  hydrostatics  would  be  incapable  of  being 
puzzled  by  C.'s  problem  :  why  my  putting  my  hand  in 
water  does  not  make  a  hole  in  it.  Similarly,  though  they 
know  nothing  of  animal  physiology  they  are  never  troubled 
by  the  mystery  of  fish  breathing  under  water,  which  when 
first  noted  by  a  child  may  come  as  a  sort  of  shock.  The 
little  boy  just  referred  to,  in  his  far-reaching  zoological 
interrogatory  asked  his  mother:  "  Can  they  (the  fish)  breathe 
with  their  moufs  under  water  ?  " 

In  his  own  investigations,  and  in  getting  instruction 
from  others,  the  child  is  frequently  coming  upon  puzzles  of 
this  sort.  The  same  boy  was  much  exercised  about  the 
sea  and  where  it  went  to.  He  expressed  a  wish  to  take  off 


84  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

his  shoes  and  to  walk  out  into  the  sea  so  as  to  see  where 
the  ships  go  to,  and  was  much  troubled  on  learning  that 
the  sea  got  deeper  and  deeper,  and  that  if  he  walked  out 
into  it  he  would  be  drowned.  At  first  he  denied  the 
paradox  (which  he  at  once  saw)  of  the  incoming  sea  going 
uphill :  "  But,  mamma,  it  doesn't  run  up,  it  doesn't  run  up, 
so  it  couldn't  come  up  over  our  heads  ? "  He  was  told 
that  this  was  so,  and  he  wisely  began  to  try  to  accom- 
modate his  mind  to  this  startling  revelation.  C.,  it  will 
be  seen,  was  much  exercised  by  this  problem  of  the 
moving  mass  of  waters,  wanting  to  know  whether  it  came 
half  way  up  the  world.  Probably  in  both  these  cases  the 
idea  of  water  rising  had  its  uncanny  alarming  aspect. 

It  is  probable  that  the  disappearance  of  a  thing  is  at  a 
very  early  stage  a  puzzle  to  the  infant.  Later  on,  too,  the 
young  mind  continues  to  be  exercised  about  this  mystery. 
Our  little  friend's  inquiry  about  the  whither  of  the  big 
receding  sea,  "  Where  does  the  sea  sim  (swim)  to  ? " 
illustrates  this  perplexity.  A  child  seems  able  to  under- 
stand the  shifting  of  an  object  of  moderate  size  from  one 
part  of  space  to  another,  but  his  conception  of  space  is 
probably  not  large  enough  to  permit  him  to  realise  how  a 
big  tract  of  water  can  pass  out  of  the  visible  scene  into  the 
unseen.  The  child's  question,  "  Where  does  all  the  wind 
go  to?"  seems  to  have  sprung  from  a  like  inability  to 
picture  a  vast  unseen  realm  of  space. 

In  addition  to  this  difficulty  of  the  disappearance  of  big 
things,  there  seems  to  be  something  in  the  vastness,  and 
the  infinite  number  of  existent  things  perceived  and 
heard  about,  which  puzzles  and  oppresses  the  young  mind. 
The  inability  to  take  in  all  the  new  facts  leads  to  a  kind  of 
resentment  of  their  multitude.  "  Mother,"  asked  a  boy  of 
four  years,  "  why  is  there  such  a  lot  of  things  in  the  world 
if  no  one  knows  all  these  things  ?  "  One  cannot  be  quite 
sure  of  the  underlying  thought  here.  The  child  may  have 
meant  merely  to  protest  against  the  production  of  so  con- 


THE   DAWN    OF   REASON.  85 

fusing  a  number  of  objects  in  the  world.  This  certainly 
seems  to  be  the  motive  in  some  children's  inquiries,  as  when 
a  little  girl,  aged  three  years  seven  months,  said  :  'Mamma, 
why  do  there  be  any  more  days,  why  do  there  ?  and  why 
don't  we  leave  off  eating  and  drinking  ? '  Here  the  burden- 
someness  of  mere  multiplicity,  of  the  unending  procession 
of  days  and  meals,  seems  to  be  the  motive.  Yet  it  is 
possible  that  the  question  about  a  lot  of  things  not  known 
to  anybody  was  prompted  by  a  deeper  difficulty,  a  dim 
presentiment  of  Berkeley's  idealism,  that  things  can  exist 
only  as  objects  of  knowledge.  This  surmise  may  seem  far- 
fetched to  some,  yet  I  have  found  what  seem  to  me  other 
traces  of  this  tendency  in  children.  A  girl  of  six  and  a 
half  years  was  talking  to  her  father  about  the  making  of  the 
world.  He  pointed  out  to  her  the  difficulty  of  creating 
things  out  of  nothing,  showing  her  that  when  we  made 
things  we  simply  fashioned  materials  anew.  She  pondered 
and  then  said:  "Perhaps  the  world's  a  fancy".  Here 
again  one  cannot  be  quite  sure  of  the  child-thought  behind 
the  words.  Yet  it  certainly  looks  like  a  falling  back  for  a 
moment  into  the  dreamy  mood  of  the  idealist,  that  mood 
in  which  we  seem  to  see  the  solid  fabric  of  things  dissolve 
into  a  shadowy  phantasmagoria. 

The  subject  of  origins  is,  as  we  know,  beset  with  puzzles 
for  the  childish  mind.  The  beginnings  of  living  things  are, 
of  course,  the  great  mystery.  "  There's  such  a  lot  of  things," 
remarked  the  little  zoologist  I  have  recently  been  quoting, 
"  I  want  to  know,  that  you  say  nobody  knows,  mamma.  I 
want  to  know  who  made  God,  and  I  want  to  know  if  Pussy 
has  eggs  to  help  her  make  ickle  (little)  kitties."  Finding 
that  this  was  not  so,  he  observed  :  "  Oh,  then,  I  s'pose  she 
has  to  have  God  to  help  her  if  she  doesn't  have  kitties  in 
eggs  given  her  to  sit  on  ".  Another  little  boy,  five  years 
old,  found  his  way  to  the  puzzle  of  the  reciprocal  genetic 
relation  of  the  hen  and  the  egg,  and  asked  his  mother : 
"When  there  z's  no  egg  where  does  the  hen  come  from? 


86  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

When  there  was  no  egg,  I  mean,  where  did  the  hen  come 
from  ?  "  In  a  similar  way,  as  we  shall  see  in  C.'s  journal,  a 
child  will  puzzle  his  brains  by  asking  how  the  first  child  was 
suckled,  or,  as  a  little  girl  of  four  and  a  half  years  put  it, 
"  When  everybody  was  a  baby — then  who  could  be  their 
nurse — if  they  were  all  babies  ?  "  The  beginnings  of  human 
life  are,  as  we  know,  a  standing  puzzle  for  the  young  in- 
vestigator. 

Much  of  this  questioning  is  metaphysical  in  that  it 
transcends  the  problems  of  every-day  life  and  of  science. 
The  child  is  metaphysician  in  the  sense  in  which  the  earliest 
human  thinkers  were  metaphysicians,  pushing  his  question- 
ing into  the  inmost  nature  of  things,  and  back  to  their 
absolute  beginnings,  as  when  he  asks  '  Who  made  God  ?  '  or 
'  What  was  there  before  God  ? ' 1  He  has  no  idea  yet  of  the 
confines  of  human  knowledge.  If  his  mother  tells  him  she 
does  not  know  he  tenaciously  clings  to  the  idea  that  some- 
body knows,  the  doctor  it  may  be,  or  the  clergyman — or 
possibly  the  policeman,  of  whose  superior  knowledge  one 
little  girl  was  forcibly  convinced  by  noting  that  her  father 
once  asked  information  of  one  of  these  stately  officials. 

Strange,  bizarre,  altogether  puzzling  to  the  listener,  are 
some  of  these  childish  questions.  A  little  American  girl 
of  nine  years  after  a  pause  in  talk  re-commenced  the  con- 
versation by  asking  :  "  Why  don't  I  think  of  something  to 
say  ? "  A  play  recently  performed  in  a  London  theatre 
made  precisely  this  appeal  to  others  by  way  of  getting  at 
one's  own  motives  a  chief  amusing  feature  in  one  of  its 
comical  characters.  Another  little  American  girl  aged 
three  one  day  left  her  play  and  her  baby  sister  named 
Edna  Belle  to  find  her  mother  and  ask  :  "  Mamma,  why 
isn't  Edna  Belle  me,  and  why  ain't  I  Edna  Belle?"2  The 

1  Illustrations  are  given  by  Compayre,  op.  cit.,  and  by  P.  Lom- 
broso,  Psicologia  del  Bambino,  p.  47  ff. 

2  Quoted  from  an  article,  "  Some  Comments  on  Babies,"  by  Miss. 
Shinn  in  the  Overland  Monthly,  Jan.,  1894. 


THE   DAWN   OF   REASON.  87 

narrator  of  this  story  adds  that  the  child  was  not  a  daughter 
of  a  professor  of  metaphysics  but  of  practical  farmer  folk. 
One  cannot  be  quite  sure  of  the  precise  drift  of  this  question. 
It  may  well  have  been  the  outcome  of  a  new  development 
of  self-consciousness,  of  a  clearer  awareness  of  the  self  in 
its  distinctness  from  others.  A  question  with  a  much  clearer 
metaphysical  ring  about  it,  showing  thought  about  the 
subtlest  problems,  was  that  put  by  a  boy  of  the  same  age  : 
"  If  I'd  gone  upstairs,  could  God  make  it  that  I  hadn't?" 
This  is  a  good  example  of  the  type  of  question  :  '  Can  he 
make  a  thing  done  not  to  have  been  done  ? '  which  accord- 
ing to  Erasmus  was  much  debated  by  theologians.1 

With  many  children  confronted  with  the  mysteries  of 
God  and  the  devil  this  questioning  often  reproduces  the 
directions  of  theological  speculation.  Thus  the  problem  of 
the  necessity  of  evil  is  clearly  recognisable  in  the  question 
once  put  by  an  American  boy  under  eight  years  of  age  to 
a  priest  who  visited  his  home:  "  Father,  why  don't  God  kill 
the  devil  and  then  there  would  be  no  more  wickedness  in 
the  world  ?  " 

All  children's  questioning  does  not  of  course  take  this 
sublime  direction.  Along  with  the  tendency  to  push  back 
inquiry  to  the  unreachable  beginning  of  things  we  mark  a 
more  modest  and  scientific  line  of  investigation  into  the 
observable  and  explainable  processes  of  nature.  Some 
questions  which  a  busy  listener  would  pooh-pooh  as  dreamy 
have  a  genuinely  scientific  value,  showing  that  the  little 
inquirer  is  trying  to  work  out  some  problem  of  fact.  This 
is  illustrated  by  a  question  put  by  a  little  boy  aged  three 
years  nine  months :  "  Why  don't  we  see  two  things  with 
our  two  eyes  ?  "  a  problem  which,  as  we  know,  has  exercised 
older  psychologists. 

When  this  more  definitely  scientific  direction  is  taken 
by  a  child's  questioning  we  may  observe  that  the  ambitious 
'  why  ?  '  begins  to  play  a  second  role,  the  first  being  now 
1  Froude,  Letters  of  Erasmus,  Lect.  vii. 


88  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

taken  by  the  more  modest  'how?'  The  germ  of  this  kind 
of  inquiry  may  be  present  in  some  of  the  early  question- 
ing about  growth.  "  How,"  asked  our  little  zoologist, 
"  does  plants  grow  when  we  plant  them,  and  how  does 
boys  grow  from  babies  to  big  boys  like  me  ?  Has  I  grown 
now  whilst  I  was  eating  my  supper  ?  See  !  "  and  he  stood 
up  to  make  the  most  of  his  stature.  Clearer  evidence  of  a 
directing  of  inquiry  into  the  processes  of  things  appears  in 
the  fifth  and  sixth  years.  A  little  girl  of  four  years  seven 
months  among  other  questionings  wanted  to  know  what 
makes  the  trains  move,  and  how  we  move  our  eyes.  The 
incessant  inquiries  of  the  boy  Clark  Maxwell  into  the  '  go ' 
of  this  thing  or  the  '  particular  go  '  of  that  illustrate  in  a 
clearer  manner  the  early  tendency  to  direct  questioning  to 
the  more  manageable  problems  to  which  science  confines 
itself. 

These  different  lines  of  questioning  are  apt  to  run  on 
concurrently  from  the  end  of  the  third  year,  a  fit  of  eager 
curiosity  about  animals  or  other  natural  objects  giving  place 
to  a  fit  of  theological  inquiry,  this  again  being  dropped 
for  an  equally  eager  inquiry  into  the  making  of  clocks,  rail- 
way engines,  and  so  on.  Yet  through  these  alternating 
bouts  of  questioning  we  can  distinguish  something  like  a 
law  of  intellectual  progress.  Questioning  as  the  most  direct 
expression  of  a  child's  curiosity  follows  the  development  of 
his  groups  of  ideas  and  of  the  interests  which  help  to  con- 
struct these.  Thus  I  think  it  a  general  rule  that  questioning 
about  the  make  or  mechanism  of  things  follows  questioning 
about  animal  ways  just  because  the  zoological  interest  (in 
a  very  crude  form  of  course)  precedes  the  mechanical.  The 
scope  of  this  early  questioning  will,  moreover,  expand  with 
intellectual  capacity,  and  more  particularly  the  capability 
of  forming  the  more  abstruse  kind  of  childish  idea.  Thus 
inquiries  into  absolute  beginnings,  into  the  origin  of  the 
world  and  of  God  himself,  indicate  the  presence  of  a  larger 
intellectual  grasp  of  time-relations  and  of  the  processes  of 
becoming. 


THE   DAWN   OF   REASON.  89 

Our  survey  of  the  field  of  childish  questioning  suggests 
that  it  is  by  no  means  an  easy  matter  to  deal  with.  It 
must  be  admitted,  I  think,  by  the  most  enthusiastic  partisan 
of  children  that  their  questioning  is  of  very  unequal  value. 
It  may  often  be  noticed  that  a  child's  'why?'  is  used  in  a 
sleepy  mechanical  way  with  no  real  desire  for  knowledge, 
any  semblance  of  answer  being  accepted  without  an  at- 
tempt to  put  a  meaning  into  it.  A  good  deal  of  the  more 
importunate  kind  of  children's  questioning,  when  they 
follow  up  question  by  question  recklessly,  as  it  seems,  and 
without  definite  aim,  appears  to  be  of  this  formal  and  life- 
less character,  an  expression  not  of  a  healthy  intellectual 
activity,  but  merely  of  a  mood  of  general  mental  discontent 
and  peevishness.  In  a  certain  amount  of  childish  question- 
ing, indeed,  we  have,  I  suspect,  to  do  with  a  distinctly 
abnormal  mental  state,  with  an  analogue  of  that  mania 
of  questions,  or  passion  for  mental  rummaging  or  prying 
into  everything,  "Grubelsucht"  as  the  Germans  call  it,  which 
is  a  well-known  phase  of  mental  disease,  and  prompts 
the  patient  to  put  such  questions  as  this  :  "  Why 
do  I  stand  here  where  I  stand  ? "  "  Why  is  a  glass  a  glass, 
a  chair  a  chair  ?  "  Such  questioning  ought,  it  is  evident, 
not  to  be  treated  too  seriously.  We  may  attach  too  much 
significance  to  a  child's  question,  labouring  hard  to  grasp 
its  meaning,  with  a  view  to  answering  it,  when  we  should 
be  wiser  if  we  viewed  it  as  a  symptom  of  mental  irritability 
and  peevishness,  to  be  got  rid  of  as  quickly  as  possible  by 
a  good  romp  or  other  healthy  distraction.1 

To  admit,  however,  that  children's  questions  may  now 
and  again  need  this  sort  of  wholesome  snubbing  is  far 
from  saying  that  we  ought  to  treat  all  their  questioning 
with  a  mild  contempt.  The  little  questioners  flatter  us  by 
attributing  superior  knowledge  to  us,  and  good  manners 
should  compel  us  to  treat  their  questions  with  some  attention. 
And  if  now  and  then  they  torment  us  with  a  string  of 

1  Cf.  Perez,  ^Education  des  le  berceau,  p.  45  ff. 


9O  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

random  reckless  questioning,  in  how  many  cases,  one 
wonders,  are  they  not  made  to  suffer,  and  that  wrongfully, 
by  having  perfectly  serious  questions  rudely  cast  back  on 
their  hands  ?  The  truth  is  that  to  understand  and  to 
answer  children's  questions  is  a  considerable  art,  including 
both  a  large  and  deep  knowledge  of  things,  and  a  quick  sym- 
pathetic insight  into  the  little  questioners'  minds,  and  a  few  of 
us  have  at  once  the  intellectual  and  the  moral  excellences 
needed  for  an  adequate  treatment  of  them.  It  is  one  of  the 
tragi-comic  features  of  human  life  that  the  ardent  little 
explorer  looking  out  with  wide-eyed  wonder  upon  his  new 
world  should  now  and  again  find  as  his  first  guide  a  nurse 
or  even  a  mother  who  will  resent  the  majority  of  his  ques- 
tions as  disturbing  the  luxurious  mood  of  indolence  in 
which  she  chooses  to  pass  her  days.  We  can  never  know 
how  much  valuable  mental  activity  has  been  checked,  how 
much  hope  and  courage  cast  down  by  this  kind  of  treat- 
ment. Yet  happily  the  questioning  impulse  is  not  easily 
eradicated,  and  a  child  who  has  suffered  at  the  outset  from 
this  wholesale  contempt  may  be  fortunate  enough  to  meet, 
while  the  spirit  of  investigation  is  still  upon  him,  one  who 
knows  and  who  has  the  good  nature  and  the  patience  to 
impart  what  he  knows  in  response  to  a  child's  appeal. 


IV. 

PRODUCTS  OF  CHILD-THOUGHT. 
The  Child's  Thoughts  about  Nature. 

WE  have  seen  in  the  previous  article  how  a  child's  mind 
behaves  when  brought  face  to  face  with  the  unknown.  We 
will  now  examine  some  of  the  more  interesting  results  of 
this  early  thought-activity,  what  are  known  as  the  char- 
acteristic ideas  of  children.  There  is  no  doubt,  I  think, 
that  children,  by  reflecting  on  what  they  see  or  other- 
wise experience  and  what  they  are  told  by  others,  fashion 
their  own  ideas  about  nature,  death  and  the  rest.  This 
tendency,  as  pointed  out  above,  discloses  itself  to  some 
extent  in  their  questions  about  things.  It  has  now  to  be 
more  fully  studied  in  their  sayings  as  a  whole.  The  ideas 
thus  formed  will  probably  prove  to  vary  considerably 
in  the  case  of  different  children,  yet  to  preserve  throughout 
these  variations  a  certain  general  character. 

These  ideas,  moreover,  like  those  of  primitive  races,  will 
be  found  to  be  a  crude  attempt  at  a  connected  system.  We 
must  not,  of  course,  expect  too  much  here.  The  earliest 
thought  of  mankind  about  nature  and  the  supernatural  was 
very  far  from  being  elaborated  into  a  consistent  logical 
whole ;  yet  we  can  see  general  forms  of  conception  or 
tendencies  of  thought  running  through  the  whole.  So  in 
the  case  of  this  largely  spontaneous  child-thought.  It  will 
disclose  to  an  unsparing  critical  inspection  vast  gaps,  and 
many  unsurmounted  contradictions.  Thus  in  the  case  of 


92  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

children,  as  in  that  of  uncultured  races,  the  supernatural 
realm  is  at  first  brought  at  most  into  only  a  very  loose  con- 
nexion with  the  visible  world.  All  the  same  there  is  seen, 
in  the  measure  of  the  individual  child's  intelligence,  the 
endeavour  to  co-ordinate,  and  the  poor  little  hard-pressed 
brain  of  a  child  will  often  pluckily  do  its  best  in  trying  to 
bring  some  connexion  into  that  congeries  of  disconnected 
worlds  into  which  he  finds  himself  so  confusingly  intro- 
duced, partly  by  the  motley  character  of  his  own  experi- 
ences, as  the  alternations  of  waking  and  sleeping,  partly 
by  the  haphazard  miscellaneous  instruction,  mythological, 
historical,  theological,  and  the  rest,  with  which  we  incon- 
siderately burden  his  mind. 

As  was  observed  in  dealing  with  children's  imaginative 
activity,  this  primitive  child-lore,  like  its  prototype  in  folk- 
lore, is  largely  a  product  of  a  nai've  vivid  fancy.  In  assign- 
ing the  relations  of  things  and  their  reasons,  a  child's  mind 
does  not  make  use  of  abstract  conceptions.  It  does  not 
talk  about  "relation,"  but  pictures  out  the  particular  re- 
lation it  wants  to  express  by  a  figurative  expression,  as 
in  apperceiving  the  juxtaposition  of  moon  and  star  as 
mamma  and  baby.  So  it  does  not  talk  of  abstract  force, 
but  figures  some  concrete  form  of  agency,  as  in  explaining 
the  wind  by  the  idea  of  somebody's  waving  a  big  fan 
somewhere.  This  first  crude  attempt  of  the  child  to 
envisage  the  world  is,  indeed,  largely  mythological,  pro- 
ceeding by  the  invention  of  concrete  and  highly  pictorial 
ideas  of  fairies,  giants  and  their  doings. 

The  element  of  thought  comes  in  with  the  recognition 
of  the  real  as  such,  and  with  the  application  of  the  products 
of  young  phantasy  to  comprehending  and  explaining  this 
reality.  And  here  we  see  how  this  primitive  child-thought, 
though  it  remains  instinct  with  glowing  imagery,  differ- 
entiates itself  from  pure  fancy.  This  last  knows  no 
restraint,  and  aims  only  at  the  delight  of  its  spontaneous 
play-like  movements,  whereas  thought  is  essentially  the 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  93 

serious  work  of  realising  and  understanding  what  exists. 
The  contrast  is  seen  plainly  enough  if  we  compare  the 
mental  attitude  of  the  child  when  he  is  frankly  romancing, 
giving  out  now  and  again  a  laugh,  which  shows  that  he 
himself  fully  recognises  the  absurdity  of  his  talk,  with  his 
attitude  when  in  gravest  of  moods  he  is  calling  upon  his 
fancy  to  aid  reason  in  explaining  some  puzzling  fact. 

How  early  this  splitting  of  the  child's  imaginative 
activity  into  these  two  forms,  the  playful  and  the  thought- 
ful, takes  place  is  not,  I  think,  very  easy  to  determine. 
Many  children  at  least  are  apt  at  first  to  take  all  that  is 
told  them  as  gospel.  To  most  of  them  about  the  age  of 
three  and  four,  I  suspect,  fairyland,  if  imagined  at  all,  is 
as  much  a  reality  as  the  visible  world.  The  disparity  of 
its  contents,  the  fairies,  dragons  and  the  rest,  with  those 
of  the  world  of  sense  does  not  trouble  their  mind,  the  two 
worlds  not  being  as  yet  mentally  juxtaposed  and  dove- 
tailed one  into  the  other.  It  is  only  later  when  the  desire 
to  understand  overtakes  and  even  passes  the  impulse  to 
frame  bright  and  striking  images,  and,  as  a  result  of  this, 
critical  reflexion  applies  itself  to  the  nursery  legends  and 
detects  their  incongruity  with  the  world  of  every-day  per- 
ception, that  a  clear  distinction  comes  to  be  drawn  between 
reality  and  fiction,  what  exists  and  can  (or  might)  be 
verified  by  sense,  and  what  is  only  pictured  by  the  mind. 

With  this  preliminary  peep  into  the  modus  operandi  of 
children's  thought,  let  us  see  what  sort  of  ideas  of  things 
they  fashion. 

Beginning  with  their  ideas  of  natural  objects  we  find,  as 
has  been  hinted,  the  influence  of  certain  predominant  tend- 
encies. Of  these  the  most  important  is  the  impulse  to  think 
of  what  is  far  off,  whether  in  space  or  time,  and  so  unobserv- 
able,  as  like  what  is  near  and  observed.  Along  with  this 
tendency,  or  rather  as  one  particular  development  of  it, 
there  goes  the  disposition  already  illustrated,  to  vivify 
nature,  to  personify  things  and  so  to  assimilate  their 


94  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

behaviour  to  the  child's  own,  and  to  explain  the  origin  of 
things  by  ideas  of  making  and  aiming  at  some  purpose. 
Since,  at  the  same  time  that  these  tendencies  are  still 
dominant,  the  child  by  his  own  observation  and  by  such 
instruction  as  he  gets,  is  gaining  insight  into  the  '  how,'  the 
mechanism  of  things,  we  find  that  his  cosmology  is  apt  to 
be  a  quaint  jumble  of  the  scientific  and  the  mythological. 
Thus  the  boy  C.  tried  to  conceive  of  the  divine  creation  of 
men  as  a  mechanical  process  with  well-marked  stages — the 
fashioning  of  stone  men,  iron  men,  and  then  real  men. 
In  many  cases  we  can  see  that  a  nature-myth  comes  in  to  eke 
out  the  deficiencies  of  mechanical  insight.  Thus,  the  pro- 
duction of  thunder  and  other  strange  and  inexplicable 
phenomena  is  referred,  as  by  the  savage,  and  even  by  many 
so-called  civilised  men  and  women,  to  the  direct  interposi- 
tion of  a  supernatural  agency.  The  theological  idea  with 
which  children  are  supplied  is  apt  to  shape  itself  into  that 
of  a  capricious  and  awfully  clever  demiurgos,  who  not  only 
made  the  world-machine  but  alters  its  working  as  often 
as  he  is  disposed.  With  this  idea  of  a  supernatural 
agent  there  is  commonly  combined  that  of  a  natural  process 
as  means  employed,  as  when  thunder  is  supposed  to  be 
caused  by  God's  treading  heavily  on  the  floor  of  the  sky. 
Contradictions  are  not  infrequent,  the  mythological  impulse 
sometimes  alternating  with  a  more  distinctly  scientific  im- 
pulse to  grasp  the  mechanical  process,  as  when  wind  is  some- 
times thought  of,  as  caused  by  a  big  fan,  and  sometimes,  e.g., 
when  heard  moaning  in  the  night,  endowed  with  life  and 
feeling. 

I  shall  make  no  attempt  to  give  a  methodical  account 
of  children's  thoughts  about  nature.  I  suspect  that  a  good 
deal  more  material  will  have  to  be  collected  before  a  com- 
plete description  of  these  thoughts  is  possible.  I  shall 
content  myself  with  giving  a  few  samples  of  their  ideas  so 
far  as  my  own  studies  have  thrown  light  on  them. 

With  respect  to  the  make  or  substance  of  things  children 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  95 

are,  I  believe,  disposed  to  regard  all  that  they  see  as  having 
the  resistant  quality  of  solid  material  substance. 

At  first,  that  is  to  say  after  the  child  has  had  experience 
enough  of  seeing  and  touching  things  at  the  same  time  to 
know  that  the  two  commonly  go  together,  he  believes  that 
all  which  he  sees  is  tangible  or  substantial.  Thus  he  will 
try  to  touch  shadows,  sunlight  dancing  on  the  wall,  and 
picture  forms.  This  tendency  to  "reify,"  or  make  things  of, 
his  visual  impressions  shows  itself  in  pretty  forms,  as  when 
the  little  girl  M.,  one  year  eleven  months  old,  "  gathered  sun- 
light in  her  hands  and  put  it  on  her  face  ".  The  same  child 
about  a  month  earlier  expressed  a  wish  to  wash  some  black 
smoke.  This  was  the  same  child  that  tried  to  make  the 
wind  behave  by  making  her  mother's  hair  tidy  ;  and  her 
belief  in  the  material  reality  of  the  wind  was  shown  by  her 
asking  her  mother  to  lift  her  up  high  so  that  she  might  see 
the  wind.  This  last,  it  is  to  be  noted,  was  an  inference  from 
touching  and  resisting  to  seeing.1  Wind,  it  has  been  well 
remarked,  keeps  something  of  its  substantiality  for  all  of 
us  long  after  shadows  have  become  the  type  of  unreality, 
proving  that  the  experience  of  resisting  something  lies  at 
the  root  of  our  sense  of  material  substance.  That  older 
children  believe  in  the  wind  as  a  living  thing  seems  suggested 
by  the  readiness  with  which  they  get  up  a  kind  of  play- 
tussle  with  it.  That  wind  even  in  less  fanciful  moments  is 
reified  is  suggested  by  the  following  story  from  the  Worcester 
collection.  A  girl  aged  nine  was  looking  out  and  seeing 
the  wind  driving  the  snow  in  the  direction  of  a  particular 
town,  Milbury :  whereupon  she  remarked,  "  I'd  like  to  live 
down  in  Milbury  ".  Asked  why,  she  replied,  "  There  must 
be  a  lot  of  wind  down  there,  it's  all  blowing  that  way  " 

Children,  as  may  be  seen  in  this  story,  are  particularly 
interested  in  the  movements  of  things.     Movement  is  the 

1  Compare  R.  L.  Stevenson's  lines  to  the  wind : 
"  I  felt  you  push,  I  heard  you  call, 
I  could  not  see  yourself  at  all  ". 

A  Child's  Garden  of  Verse,  xxv. 


96  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

clearest  and  most  impressive  manifestation  of  life.  All 
apparently  spontaneous  or  self-caused  movements  are  ac- 
cordingly taken  by  children,  as  by  primitive  man,  to  be  the 
sign  of  life,  the  outcome  of  something  analogous  to  their 
own  impulses.  Hence  the  movements  of  falling  leaves,  of 
running  water,  of  feathers  and  the  like  are  specially  sug- 
gestive of  life.  Wind  owes  much  of  its  vitality,  as  seen  in 
the  facile  personification  of  it  by  the  poet,  to  its  apparently 
uncaused  movements.  Some  children  in  the  Infant  Depart- 
ment of  a  London  Board  School  were  asked  what  things 
in  the  room  were  alive,  and  they  promptly  replied  the 
smoke  and  the  fire.  Big  things  moving  by  an  internal 
mechanism  of  which  the  child  knows  nothing,  more  especi- 
ally engines,  are  of  course  endowed  with  life.  A  little  girl 
of  thirteen  months  offered  a  biscuit  to  a  steam-tram,  and 
the  author  of  The  Invisible  Playmate  tells  us  that  his  little 
girl  wanted  to  stroke  the  "  dear  head  "  of  a  locomotive.  A 
child  has  been  known  to  ask  whether  a  steam-engine  was 
alive.  In  like  manner,  savages  on  first  seeing  the  self- 
moving  steamer  take  it  for  a  big  animal.  The  fear  of  a  dog 
at  the  sight  of  an  unfamiliar  object  appearing  to  move  of 
itself,  as  a  parasol  blown  along  the  ground  by  the  wind, 
seems  to  imply  a  rudiment  of  the  same  impulse  to  interpret 
self-movement  as  a  sign  of  life.1 

The  child's  impulse  to  give  life  to  moving  things  may 
lead  him  to  overlook  the  fact  that  the  movement  is  caused 
by  an  external  force,  and  this  even  when  the  force  is 
exerted  by  himself.  The  boy  C.  on  finding  the  cushion 
he  was  sitting  upon  slipping  from  under  him  in  consequence 
of  his  own  wriggling  movements  pronounced  it  alive.  In 
like  manner  children,  as  suggested  above,  ascribe  life  to 
their  moving  playthings.  Thus,  C.'s  sister  when  five  years 
old  stopped  one  day  trundling  her  hoop,  and  turning  to 
her  mother,  exclaimed :  "  Ma,  I  do  think  this  hoop  must 
be  alive,  it  is  so  sensible :  it  goes  where  I  want  it  to ". 

1  See  P.  Lombroso,  op.  cit.,  p.  26  ff. 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  97 

Another  little  girl  two  and  a  quarter  years  old  on  having 
a  string  attached  to  a  ball  put  into  her  hand,  and  after 
swinging  it  round  mechanically,  began  to  notice  the  move- 
ment of  the  ball,  and  said  to  herself,  "  Funny  ball !  "  In  both 
these  cases,  although  the  movement  was  directly  caused  by 
the  child,  it  was  certainly  in  the  first  case,  and  apparently 
in  the  second,  attributed  to  the  object. 

Next  to  movement  apparently  spontaneous  sound 
appears  to  be  a  common  reason  for  attributing  life  to 
inanimate  objects.  Are  not  movement  and  vocal  sound  the 
two  great  channels  of  utterance  of  the  child's  own  impulses? 
The  little  girl  M.,  when  just  two  years  old,  being  asked 
by  her  mother  for  a  kiss,  answered  prettily,  '  Tiss 
(kiss)  gone  away'.  This  may,  of  course,  have  been 
merely  a  child's  way  of  using  language,  but  the  fact  that 
the  same  little  girl  asked  to  see  a  '  knock '  suggests  that 
she  was  disposed  to  give  reality  and  life  to  sounds.  Its  sound 
greatly  helps  the  persuasion  that  the  wind  is  alive.  A 
little  boy  assured  his  teacher  that  the  wind  was  alive,  for 
he  heard  it  whistling  in  the  night.  The  ascription  of  life 
to  fire  is  probably  aided  by  its  sputtering  crackling  noises. 
The  impulse,  too,  to  endow  so  little  organic-looking  an 
object  as  a  railway  engine  with  conscious  life  is  probably 
supported  by  the  knowledge  of  its  puffing  and  whistling. 
Pierre  Loti,  when  as  a  child  he  first  saw  the  sea,  re- 
garded it  as  a  living  monster,  no  doubt  on  the  ground  of 
its  movement  and  its  noise.  The  personification  of  the 
echo  by  the  child,  of  which  George  Sand's  reminiscences 
give  an  excellent  example,  as  also  by  uncultured  man,  is 
a  signal  illustration  of  the  suggestive  force  of  a  voice-like 
sound. 

Closely  connected  with  this  impulse  to  ascribe  life  to 
what  older  folk  regard  as  inanimate  objects  is  the  tendency 
to  conceive  them  as  growing.  This  is  illustrated  in  the 
remark  of  the  boy  C.,  that  his  stick  would  in  time  grow 
bigger.  On  the  other  hand,  there  is  in  the  Worcester  Collec- 

7 


98  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

tion  a  curious  story  of  a  little  American  boy  of  three  who, 
having  climbed  up  into  a  large  waggon,  and  being  asked, 
"  How  are  you  going  to  get  out?"  replied,  "I  can  stay 
here  till  it  gets  little  and  then  I  can  get  out  my  own  self". 
We  shall  see  presently  that  shrinkage  or  diminution  of  size 
is  sometimes  attributed  by  the  child-mind  to  people  when 
getting  old.  So  that  we  seem  to  have  in  each  of  these 
cases  the  extension  to  things  generally  of  an  idea  first 
formed  in  connexion  with  the  observation  of  human  life. 

Children's  ideas  of  natural  objects  are  anthropomorphic, 
not  merely  as  reflecting  their  own  life,  but  as  modelled 
after  the  analogy  of  the  effects  of  their  action.  Quite 
young  children  are  apt  to  extend  the  ideas  broken  and 
mended  to  objects  generally.  Anything  which  seems  to 
have  become  reduced  by  losing  a  portion  of  itself  is  said  to 
be  '  broken  '.  A  little  boy  of  three,  on  seeing  the  moon 
partly  covered  by  a  cloud,  remarked,  '*  The  moon  is  broken  ". 
On  the  other  hand,  in  the  case  of  one  little  boy,  everything 
intact  was  said  to  be  mended.  It  may  be  said,  however, 
that  we  cannot  safely  infer  from  such  analogical  use  of 
common  language  that  children  distinctly  think  of  all 
objects  as  undergoing  breakage  and  repair  :  for  these  ex- 
pressions in  the  child's  vocabulary  may  refer  rather  to  the 
resulting  appearances,  than  to  the  processes  by  which  they 
are  brought  about. 

Clearer  evidences  of  this  reflexion  on  to  nature  of  the 
characteristics  of  his  own  life  appear  when  a  child  begins 
to  speculate  about  mechanical  processes,  which  he  invari- 
ably conceives  of  after  the  analogy  of  his  own  actions. 
This  was  illustrated  in  dealing  with  children's  questions. 
We  see  it  still  more  clearly  manifested  in  some  of  their 
ideas.  One  of  the  most  curious  instances  of  this  that  I 
have  met  with  is  seen  in  early  theorisings  about  the  cause 
of  wind.  One  of  the  children  examined  by  Mr.  Kratz 
said  the  tree  was  to  make  the  wind  blow.  A  pupil  of  mine 
distinctly  recalls  that  when  a  child  he  accounted  for  the 


PRODUCTS   OF  CHILD-THOUGHT.  99 

wind  at  night  by  the  swaying  of  two  large  elms  in  front  of 
the  house  and  not  far  from  the  windows  of  his  bedroom. 
This  reversing  of  the  real  order  of  cause  and  effect  looks 
silly,  until  we  remember  that  the  child  necessarily  looks  at 
movement  in  the  light  of  his  own  actions.  He  moves 
things,  e.g.,  the  water,  by  his  moving  limbs ;  we  set  the 
air  in  motion  by  a  moving  fan  ;  it  seems,  therefore,  natural 
to  him  that  the  wind-movements  should  be  caused  by  the 
pressure  of  some  moving  thing  ;  and  there  is  the  tree  actu- 
ally seen  to  be  moving. 

So  far  I  have  spoken  for  the  most  part  of  children's 
ideas  about  near  and  accessible  objects.  Their  notions  of 
what  is  distant  and  inaccessible  are,  as  remarked,  wont  to 
be  formed  on  the  model  of  the  first.  Here,  however,  their 
knowledge  of  things  will  be  largely  dependent  on  others' 
information,  so  that  the  naive  impulse  of  childish  intelligence 
has,  as  best  it  may,  to  work  under  the  limitations  of  an  im- 
perfectly understood  language. 

It  is  perhaps  hardly  necessary  to  remind  the  reader 
that  children's  ideas  of  distance  before  they  begin  to  travel 
far  are  necessarily  very  inadequate.  They  are  disposed  to 
localise  the  distant  objects  they  see,  as  the  sun,  moon  and 
stars,  and  the  places  they  hear  about  on  the  earth's  surface 
as  near  as  possible.  The  tendency  to  approximate  things 
as  seen  in  the  infant's  stretching  out  of  the  hand  to  touch  the 
moon  lives  on  in  the  later  impulse  to  localise  the  sky  and 
heavenly  bodies  just  beyond  the  farthest  terrestrial  object 
seen,  as  when  a  child  thought  they  were  just  above  the 
•church  spire,  another  that  they  could  be  reached  by  tying 
a  number  of  ladders  together,  another  that  the  setting  sun 
went  close  behind  the  ridge  of  hills,  and  so  forth.  The 
stars,  being  so  much  smaller  looking,  seem  to  be  located 
farther  off  than  the  sun  and  moon.  Similarly  when  they 
hear  of  a  distant  place,  as  India,  they  tend  to  project  it  just 
beyond  the  farthest  point  known  to  them,  say  Hampstead, 
to  which  they  were  once  taken  on  a  long,  long  journey  from 


IOO  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

their  East  End  home.  A  child's  standard  of  size  and 
distance  is,  as  all  know  who  have  revisited  the  home  of 
their  childhood  after  many  years,  very  different  from  the 
adult's.  To  the  little  legs  unused  as  yet  to  more  than  short 
spells  of  locomotion  a  mile  seems  stupendous  :  and  then 
the  half-formed  brain  cannot  yet  pile  up  the  units  of 
measurement  well  enough  to  conceive  of  hundreds  and 
thousands  of  miles. 

The  child  appears  to  think  of  the  world  as  a  circular 
plain,  and  of  the  sky  as  a  sort  of  inverted  bowl  upon  it. 
C.'s  sister  used  on  looking  at  the  sky  to  fancy  she  was  inside 
a  blue  balloon.  That  is  to  say  he  takes  them  to  be  what  they 
look.  In  a  similar  manner  C.  took  the  sun  to  be  a  great  disc 
which  could  be  put  on  the  round  globe  to  make  a  '  see-saw '. 
When  this  '  natural  realism '  gets  corrected,  children  go  to 
work  to  convert  what  is  told  them  into  an  intelligible  form. 
Thus  they  begin  to  speculate  about  the  other  side  of  the 
globe,  and,  as  Mr.  Barrie  reminds  us,  are  apt  to  fancy  they 
can  know  about  it  by  peeping  down  a  well.  When  re- 
ligious instruction  introduces  the  new  region  of  heaven 
they  are  apt  to  localise  it  just  above  the  sky,  which  to  their 
thought  forms  its  floor.  Some  genuine  thought-work  is 
seen  in  the  effort  to  harmonise  the  various  things  they 
learn  by  observation  and  instruction  about  the  celestial 
region  into  a  connected  whole.  Thus  the  sky  is  apt  to  be 
thought  of  as  thin,  this  idea  being  probably  formed  for  the 
purpose  of  explaining  the  shining  through  of  moon  and  stars. 
Stars  are,  as  we  know,  commonly  thought  of  by  the  child 
as  holes  in  the  sky  letting  through  the  light  beyond.  One 
Boston  child  ingeniously  applied  the  idea  of  the  thinness  of 
the  sky  to  explain  the  appearance  of  the  moon  when  one 
half  is  bright  and  the  other  faintly  illumined,  supposing 
it  to  be  half-way  through  the  partially  diaphanous  floor. 
Others  again  prettily  accounted  for  the  waning  of  the 
moon  to  a  crescent  by  saying  it  was  half  stuck  or  half 
buttoned  into  the  sky. 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  IOI 

The  movements  of  the  sun  and  other  heavenly  bodies 
are  similarly  apperceived  by  help  of  ideas  of  movements  of 
familiar  terrestrial  objects.  Thus  the  sun  was  thought  by 
the  Boston  children  half-mythologically,  half-mechanically, 
to  roll,  to  fly,  to  be  blown  (like  a  soap  bubble  or  balloon  ?) 
and  so  forth.  The  an  thro  pocen  trie  form  of  teleological  ex- 
planation is  apt  to  creep  in,  as  when  a  Boston  child  said 
charmingly- that  the  moon  comes  round  when  people  forget 
to  light  some  lamps.  Theological  ideas,  too,  are  pressed 
into  this  sphere  of  explanation,  as  in  the  attribution  of  the 
disappearance  of  the  sun  to  God's  pulling  it  up  higher  out 
of  sight,  to  his  taking  it  into  heaven  and  putting  it  to  bed, 
-and  so  forth.  These  ideas  are  pretty  obviously  not  those 
of  a  country  child  with  a  horizon.  There  is  rather  more  of 
nature-observation  in  the  idea  of  another  child  that  the  sun 
after  setting  lies  under  the  trees  where  angels  mind  it. 

The  impressive  phenomena  of  thunder  and  lightning 
give  rise  in  the  case  of  the  child  as  in  that  of  the  Nature-man 
to  some  fine  myth-making.  The  American  children,  as  al- 
ready observed,  have  different  mechanical  illustrations  for 
setting  forth  the  modus  of  the  supernatural  operation  here, 
thunder  being  thought  of  now  as  God  groaning,  now  as  his 
walking  heavily  on  the  floor  of  heaven  (cf.  the  old  Norse  idea 
that  thunder  is  caused  by  the  rolling  of  Thor's  chariot), 
now  as  his  hammering,  now  as  his  having  coals  run  in— 
ideas  which  show  how  naively  the  child-mind  humanises 
the  Deity,  making  him  a  respectable  citizen  with  a  house 
and  a  coal-cellar.  In  like  manner  the  lightning  is  attri- 
buted to  God's  burning  the  gas  quick,  striking  many 
matches  at  once,  or  other  familiar  human  device  for  getting 
a  brilliant  light  suddenly.  So  God  turns  on  rain  by  a 
tap,  or  lets  it  down  from  a  cistern  by  a  hose,  or,  better, 
passes  it  through  a  sieve  or  a  dipper  with  holes.1  In  like 
manner  a  high  wind  was  explained  by  a  girl  of  five  and  a 

1  See  the  article  on  "  The  Contents  of  Children's  Minds  "  already 
referred  to. 


102  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

half  by  saying  that  it  was  God's  birthday,  and  he  had  re- 
ceived a  trumpet  as  a  present. 

Throughout  the  whole  region  of  these  mysterious  phe- 
nomena we  have  illustrations  of  the  anthropocentric  ten- 
dency to  regard  what  takes  place  as  designed  for  us  poor 
mortals.  The  little  girl  of  whom  Mr.  Canton  writes  thought 
"  the  wind,  and  the  rain  and  the  moon  'walking'  came  out 
to  see  her,  and  the  flowers  woke  up  with  the  same  laudable 
object  ".1  When  frightened  by  the  crash  of  the  thunder  a 
child  instinctively  thinks  that  it  is  all  done  to  vex  his  little 
soul.  One  of  the  funniest  examples  of  the  application  of 
this  idea  I  have  met  with  is  in  the  Worcester  Collection. 
Two  children,  D.  and  K.,  aged  ten  and  five  respectively, 
live  in  a  small  American  town.  D.,  who  is  reading  about 
an  earthquake,  addresses  his  mother  thus  :  "  Oh,  isn't  it 
dreadful,  mamma  ?  Do  you  suppose  we  will  ever  have  one 
here?"  K.,  intervening  with  the  characteristic  impulse 
of  the  young  child  to  correct  his  elders:  "  Why,  no,  D.,  they 
don't  have  earthquakes  in  little  towns  like  this".  There  is 
much  to  unravel  in  this  delightful  childish  observation.  It 
looks  to  my  mind  as  if  the  earthquake  were  envisaged  by 
the  little  five-year-old  as  a  show,  God  being  presumably  the 
travelling  showman,  who  takes  care  to  display  his  fearful 
wonders  only  where  there  is  an  adequate  body  of  spectators. 

Finally,  the  same  impulse  to  understand  the  new  and 
strange  by  assimilating  it  to  the  familiar  is,  so  far  as  I  can 
gather,  seen  in  children's  first  ideas  about  those  puzzling" 
semblances  of  visible  objects  which  are  due  to  subjective 
sensations.  As  we  shall  see  in  C.'s  case  the  bright  spectra 
or  after-images  caused  by  looking  at  the  sun  are  instinct- 
ively objectived  by  the  child,  that  is  regarded  as  things 
external  to  his  body.  Here  is  a  pretty  full  account  of  a 
child's  thought  about  these  subjective  optical  phenomena. 
A  little  boy  of  five,  our  little  zoologist,  in  poor  health  at  the 
time,  "constantly  imagined  he  saw  angels,  and  said  they  were 

1  The  Invisible  Playmate,  pp.  27,  28. 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  103 

not  white,  that  was  a  mistake,  they  were  little  coloured 
things,  light  and  beautiful,  and  they  went  into  the  toy- 
basket  and  played  with  his  toys  ".  Here  we  have  not  only 
objectifying  but  myth-building.  A  year  later  he  returned 
to  the  subject.  "  He  stood  at  the  window  at  B.  looking 
out  at  a  sea-mist  thoughtfully  and  said  suddenly, '  Mamma, 
do  you  remember  I  told  you  that  I  had  seen  angels? 
Well,  I  want  now  to  say  they  were  not  angels,  though  I 
thought  they  were.  I  have  seen  it  often  lately,  I  see  it 
now :  it  is  bright  stars,  small  bright  stars  moving  by.  I 
see  it  in  the  mist  before  that  tree.  I  see  it  oftenest  in  the 
misty  days.  .  .  .  Perhaps  by-and-by  I  shall  think  it  is 
something  in  my  own  eyes.' '  Here  we  see  a  long  and 
painstaking  attempt  of  a  child's  brain  to  read  a  meaning 
into  the  '  flying  spots,1  which  many  of  us  know  though  we 
hardly  give  them  a  moment's  attention. 

What  are  children's  first  thoughts  about  their  dreams 
like  ?  I  have  not  been  able  to  collect  much  evidence  on 
this  head.  What  seems  certain  is  that  to  the  simple  intelli- 
gence of  the  child  these  counterfeits  of  ordinary  sense- 
presentations  are  real  external  things.  The  crudest  mani- 
festation of  this  thought-tendency  is  seen  in  taking  the 
dream-apparition  to  be  actually  present  in  the  bedroom. 
A  boy  in  an  elementary  school  in  London,  aged  five  years, 
said  one  day :  "  Teacher,  I  saw  an  old  woman  one  night 
against  my  bed  ".  Another  child,  a  little  girl,  in  the  same 
school  told  her  mother,  that  she  had  seen  a  funeral  last 
night,  and  on  being  asked,  "  Where  ?"  answered  quaintly, 
"  I  saw  it  in  my  pillow  ".  A  little  boy  whom  I  know  once 
asked  his  mother  not  to  put  him  to  bed  in  a  certain  room, 
"  because  there  were  so  many  dreams  in  the  room  ".  In 
thus  materialising  the  dream  and  localising  it  in  the  actual 
surroundings,  the  child  but  reflects  the  early  thought  of  the 
race  which  starts  from  the  supposition  that  the  man  or 
animal  which  appears  in  a  dream  is  a  material  reality  which 
actually  approaches  the  sleeper. 


104  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD 

The  Nature-man,  as  we  know  from  Professor  Tylor's 
researches,  goes  on  to  explain  dreams  by  his  theory  of  souls 
or  '  doubles '  (animism).  Children  do  not  often  find  their 
way  to  so  subtle  a  line  of  thought.  Much  more  commonly 
they  pass  from  the  first  stage  of  acceptance  of  objects 
present  to  their  senses  to  the  identification  of  dreamland 
with  the  other  and  invisible  world  of  fairyland.  There  is 
little  doubt  that  the  imaginative  child  firmly  believes  in 
the  existence  of  this  invisible  world,  keeps  it  apart  from 
the  visible  one,  even  though  at  times  he  may  give  it  a 
definite  locality  in  this  (e.g.,  in  C.'s  case,  the  wall  of  the 
bedroom).  He  gets  access  to  it  by  shutting  out  the  real 
world,  as  when  he  closes  his  eyes  tightly  and  '  thinks  '. 
With  such  a  child,  dreams  get  taken  up  into  the  invisible 
world.  Going  to  sleep  is  now  recognised  as  the  surest  way 
of  passing  into  this  region.  The  varying  colour  of  his 
dreams,  now  bright  and  dazzling  in  their  beauty,  now  black 
and  terrifying,  may  be  explained  by  a  reference  to  the  divis- 
ion of  that  fairy  world  into  princes,  good  fairies,  on  the  one 
hand,  and  cruel  giants,  witches,  and  the  like,  on  the  other. 

We  may  now  pass  to  some  of  children's  characteristic 
ideas  about  living  things,  more  particularly  human  beings, 
and  the  familiar  domestic  animals.  The  most  interesting 
of  these  I  think  are  those  respecting  growth  and  birth. 

As  already  mentioned,  growth  is  one  of  the  most 
stimulating  of  childish  puzzles.  A  child,  led  no  doubt  by 
what  others  tell  him,  finds  that  things  are  in  general  made 
bigger  by  additions  from  without,  and  his  earliest  conception 
of  growth  is,  I  think,  that  of  such  addition.  Thus,  plants  are 
made  to  grow,  that  is,  swell  out,  by  the  rain.  The  idea  that 
the  growth  or  expansion  of  animals  comes  from  eating  is 
easily  reached  by  the  childish  intelligence,  and,  as  we  know, 
nurses  and  parents  have  a  way  of  recommending  the  less 
attractive  sorts  of  diet  by  telling  children  that  they  will 
make  them  grow.  The  idea  that  the  sun  makes  us  grow, 
often  suggested  by  parents  (who  may  be  ignorant  of  the 


PRODUCTS  OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  IO$ 

fact  that  growth  is  more  rapid  in  the  summer  than  in  the 
winter),  is  probably  interpreted  by  the  analogy  of  an  infusion 
of  something  into  the  body. 

In  carrying  out  my  inquiries  into  this  region  of  childish 
ideas,  I  lighted  quite  unexpectedly  on  the  queer  notion  that 
towards  the  end  of  life  there  is  a  reverse  process  of  shrink- 
age. Old  people  are  supposed  to  become  little  again. 
The  first  instance  of  this  was  supplied  me  by  the  Worcester 
Collection  of  Thoughts.  A  little  girl  of  three  once  said  to 
her  mother  :  "  When  I  am  a  big  girl  and  you  are  a  little  girl 
I  shall  whip  you  just  as  you  whipped  me  now  ".  At  first 
one  is  almost  disposed  to  think  that  this  child  must  have 
heard  of  Mr.  Anstey's  amusing  story  Vice  Versd.  Yet  this 
idea  seems  too  improbable:  and  I  have  since  found  that  she 
is  not  by  any  means  the  only  one  who  has  entertained  this 
idea.  A  little  boy  that  I  know,  when  about  three  and  a 
half  years  old,  used  often  to  say  to  his  mother  with  perfect 
seriousness  of  manner  :  "  When  I  am  big  then  you  will  be 
little,  then  I  will  carry  you  about  and  dress  you  and  put 
you  to  sleep  ". 

I  happened  to  mention  this  fact  at  a  meeting  of  mothers 
and  teachers,  when  I  received  further  evidence  of  this 
tendency  of  child-thought.  One  lady  whom  I  know  could 
recollect  quite  clearly  that  when  a  little  girl  she  was 
promised  by  her  aunt  some  treasures,  trinkets  I  fancy,  when 
she  grew  up  ;  and  that  she  at  once  turned  to  her  aunt  and 
promised  her  that  she  would  then  give  her  in  exchange 
all  her  dolls,  as  by  that  time  she  (the  aunt)  would  be  a 
little  girl.  Another  case  narrated  was  that  of  a  little  girl  of 
three  and  a  half  years,  who  when  her  elder  brother  and 
sister  spoke  to  her  about  her  getting  big  rejoined  :  "  What 
will  you  do  when  you  are  little?  "  A  third  case  mentioned 
was  that  of  a  child  asking  about  some  old  person  of  her 
acquaintance:  "When  will  she  begin  to  get  small?"  I 
have  since  obtained  corroboratory  instances  from  parents 
and  teachers  of  infant  classes.  Thus  a  lady  writes  that  a 


106  STUDIES   OF    CHILDHOOD. 

little  girl,  a  cousin  of  hers  aged  four,  to  whom  she  was  reading 
something  about  an  old  woman,  asked  :  "  Do  people  turn 
back  into  babies  when  they  get  quite  old  ?  " 

What,  it  may  be  asked,  does  this  queer  idea  of  shrink- 
age in  old  age  mean  ?  By  what  quaint  zig-zag  movement 
of  childish  thought  was  the  notion  reached  ?  I  cannot 
learn  that  there  is  any  such  idea  in  primitive  folk-lore,  and 
this  suggests  that  children  find  their  way  to  it,  in  part  at 
least,  by  the  suggestions  of  older  people's  words.  A  child 
may,  no  doubt,  notice  that  old  people  stoop,  and  look 
small,  and  the  fairy  book  with  little  old  women  may 
strengthen  the  tendency  to  think  of  shrinkage.  But  I 
cannot  bring  myself  to  believe  that  this  would  suffice  to 
produce  the  idea  in  so  many  cases. 

That  there  is  much  in  what  the  little  folk  hear  us  say 
fitted  to  raise  in  their  minds  an  idea  of  shrinking  back  into 
child-form  is  certain.  Many  children  must,  at  some  time 
or  another,  have  overheard  their  elders  speaking  of  old 
feeble  people  getting  childish  ;  and  we  must  remember  that 
even  the  attributive  '  silly '  applied  to  old  people  might  lead 
a  child  to  infer  a  return  to  childhood  ;  for  if  there  is  one 
thing  that  children — true  unsophisticated  children— believe 
in  it  is  the  all-knowingness  of  grown-ups  as  contrasted 
with  the  know-nothingness  of  themselves.  C.'s  belief  in 
the  preternatural  calculating  powers  of  Goliath  is  an 
example  of  this  correlation  in  the  child's  consciousness 
between  size  and  intelligence.1 

But  I  suspect  that  there  is  a  further  source  of  this 
characteristic  product  of  early  thought,  involving  still  more 
of  the  child's  philosophizing.  As  we  have  seen,  a  child 
cannot  accept  an  absolute  beginning  of  things,  and  we 
shall  presently  find  that  he  is  equally  incapable  of  believing 

1  That  this  is  not  the  complete  explanation  is  suggested  by  a  story 
told  by  Perez.  His  nephew,  over  four  years,  on  meeting  a  little  old 
man  said  to  his  uncle  :  "  When  I  shall  be  a  little  old  man,  will  you 
be  young  ?  "  (U  Enfant  de  trois  a  sepi  ans,  p.  219). 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  TO/ 

in  an  absolute  ending.  He  knows  that  we  begin  our  earthly 
life  as  babies.  Well,  the  babies  must  come  from  something, 
and  when  we  die  we  must  pass  into  something.  What 
more  natural,  then,  than  the  idea  of  a  rhythmical  alternation 
of  cycles  of  existence,  babies  passing  into  grown-ups,  and 
these  again  into  babies,  and  so  the  race  kept  going  ?  Does 
this  seem  too  far-fetched  an  explanation  ?  I  think  it  will 
be  found  less  so  if  it  is  remembered  that  according  to  our  way 
of  instructing  these  active  little  brairts,  people  are  brought 
to  earth  as  babies  in  angels'  arms,  and  that  when  they  die 
they  are  taken  back  also  in  angels'  arms.  Now  as  the 
angel  remains  of  constant  size, — for  this  their  pictures  vouch 
— it  follows  that  old  people,  when  they  are  dead  at  least, 
must  have  shrivelled  up  to  nursable  dimensions  ;  and  as 
the  child,  when  he  philosophizes,  knows  nothing  of  miracu- 
lous or  cataclasmic  changes,  he  naturally  supposes  that 
this  shrivelling  up  is  gradual  like  that  of  flowers  and  other 
things  when  they  fade.1 

I  am  disposed  to  think,  then,  that  in  this  idea  of  senile 
shrinkage  we  have  one  of  the  most  interesting  and  con- 
vincing examples  of  a  child's  philosophizing,  of  his  impulse 
to  reflect  on  what  he  sees  and  hears  about  with  a  view  to 
systematise.  Yet  the  matter  requires  further  observation. 
Is  it  thoughtful,  intelligent  children,  who  excogitate  this 
idea?  Would  it  be  possible  to  get  the  child's  own  explana- 
tion of  it  before  he  has  completely  outgrown  it  ?  2 

The  origin  of  babies  and  young  animals  furnishes  the 
small  brain,  as  we  have  seen,  with  much  food  for  speculation. 
Here  the  little  thinker  is  not  often  left  to  excogitate  a 

1  Perhaps,  too,  our  way  of  playfully  calling  children  little  old  men 
and  women  favours  the  supposition  that  they  are  old  people  turned 
young  again. 

2  Egger  quotes  a  remark  of  a  little  girl :  "  I  shall  carry  Emile 
(her  older  brother)  when  he  gets  little  ".    This  may,  as  Egger  suggests, 
have  been  merely  a  confusion  of  the  conditional  and  the  future. 
But  the  idea   about  old  people's  shrinking  cannot   be   dismissed  in 
this  summary  way  (see  Perez,  First  Three  Years  of  Childhood,  p.  224). 


IO8  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

theory  for  himself.  His  inconvenient  questionings  in  this 
direction  have  to  be  firmly  checked,  and  various  and  truly 
wonderful  are  the  ways  in  which  the  nurse  and  the  mother 
are  wont  to  do  this.  Any  fiction  is  supposed  to  be  good 
enough  for  the  purpose.  Divine  action,  as  remarked  above, 
is  commonly  called  in,  the  questioner  being  told  that 
the  baby  has  been  sent  down  from  heaven  in  the  arms  of 
an  angel  and  so  forth.  Fairy  stories  with  their  pretty 
conceits,  as  that  of  the  child  Thumbkin  growing  out  of  a 
flower  in  Hans  Andersen's  book,  contribute  their  sugges- 
tions, and  so  there  arises  a  mass  of  child-lore  about  babies 
in  which  we  can  see  that  the  main  ideas  are  supplied  by 
others,  though  now  and  again  we  catch  a  glimpse  of  the 
child's  own  contributions.  Thus  according  to  Stanley 
Hall's  report  the  Boston  children  said,  among  other  things, 
that  God  makes  babies  in  heaven,  lets  them  down  or  drops 
them  for  the  women  and  doctors  to  catch  them,  or  that  he 
brings  them  down  a  wooden  ladder  backwards  and  pulls  it 
up  again,  or  that  mamma,  nurse  or  doctor  goes  up  and 
fetches  them  in  a  balloon.  They  are  said  by  some  to  grow 
in  cabbages  or  to  be  placed  by  God  in  water,  perhaps  in 
the  sewer,  where  they  are  found  by  the  doctor,  who  takes 
them  to  sick  folks  that  want  them.  Here  we  have  delicious 
touches  of  childish  fancy,  quaint  adaptations  of  fairy  and 
Bible  lore,  as  in  the  use  of  Jacob's  ladder  and  of  the  legend 
of  Moses  placed  among  the  bulrushes,  this  last  being  en- 
riched by  the  thorough  master-stroke  of  child-genius,  the 
idea  of  the  dark,  mysterious,  wonder-producing  sewer.  In 
spite  too  of  all  that  others  do  to  impress  the  traditional 
notions  of  the  nursery  here,  we  find  that  a  child  will  now 
and  again  think  out  the  whole  subject  for  himself.  The 
little  boy  C.  is  not  the  only  one  I  find  who  is  of  the  opinion 
that  babies  are  got  at  a  shop.  Another  little  boy,  I  am 
informed,  once  asked  his  mamma  in  the  abrupt  childish 
manner,  "  Mamma,  vere  did  Tommy  (his  own  name)  turn 
(come)  from  ?  "  and  then  with  the  equally  childish  way  of 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  109 

sparing  you  the  trouble  of  answering  his  question,  himself 
observed,  quite  to  his  own  satisfaction,  "  Mamma  did  tie 
(buy)  Tommy  in  a  s'op  (shop)  ".  Another  child,  seeing  the 
announcement  "  Families  Supplied "  in  a  grocer's  shop, 
begged  his  mother  to  get  him  a  baby.  This  looks  like  a  real 
childish  idea.  To  the  young  imagination  the  shop  is  a 
veritable  wonderland,  an  Eldorado  of  valuables,  and  it 
appears  quite  reasonable  to  the  childish  intelligence  that 
babies  like  dolls  and  other  treasures  should  be  procurable 
there. 

The  ideas  partlycommunicated  by  others,  partly  thought 
out  for  themselves  are  carried  over  into  the  beginnings  of 
animal  life.  Thus,  as  we  have  seen,  one  little  boy  supposed 
that  God  helps  pussy  to  have  "  'ickle  kitties,"  seeing  that  she 
hasn't  any  kitties  in  eggs  given  her  to  sit  upon. 

Psychological  Ideas. 

We  may  now  pass  to  some  of  the  characteristic  modes 
of  child-thought  about  that  standing  mystery,  the  self.  As 
our  discussion  of  the  child's  ideas  of  origin,  growth  and 
final  shrinkage  suggests,  a  good  deal  of  his  most  earnest 
thinking  is  devoted  to  problems  relating  to  himself. 

The  date  of  the  first  thought  about  self,  of  the  first  dim 
stage  of  self-awareness,  probably  varies  considerably  in  the 
case  of  different  children  according  to  rapidity  of  mental 
development  and  circumstances.  The  little  girl,  who  was 
afterwards  to  be  known  as  George  Sand,  may  be  supposed 
to  have  had  an  exceptional  development ;  and  the  accident 
of  infancy  to  which  she  refers  as  having  aroused  the  earliest 
form  of  self-consciousness  was,  of  course,  exceptional  too. 
There  are  probably  many  robust  and  dull  children,  know- 
ing little  of  life's  misery,  and  allowed  in  general  to  have 
their  own  way,  who  have  but  little  more  of  self-conscious- 
ness than  that,  say,  of  a  young,  well-favoured  porker. 

The  earliest  idea  of  self  seems  to  be  obtained  by  the 
child  through  an  examination  by  the  senses  of  touch  and 


IIO  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

sight  of  his  own  body.  A  child  has  been  observed  to  study 
his  fingers  attentively  in  the  fourth  and  fifth  month,  and 
this  scrutiny  goes  on  all  through  the  second  year  and  even 
into  the  third.1  Children  seem  to  be  impressed  quite  early 
by  the  fact  that  in  laying  hold  of  a  part  of  the  body  with 
the  hand  they  get  a  different  kind  of  experience  from  that 
which  they  obtain  when  they  grasp  a  foreign  object. 
Through  these  self-graspings,  self-strikings,  self-bitings, 
aided  by  the  very  varied,  and  often  extremely  disagreeable 
operations  of  the  nurse  and  others  on  the  surface  of  their 
bodies,  they  probably  reach  during  the  first  year  the 
idea  that  their  body  is  different  from  all  other  things,  is 
'  me '  in  the  sense  that  it  is  the  living  seat  of  pain  and 
pleasure.  The  growing  power  of  movement  of  limb, 
especially  when  the  crawling  stage  is  reached,  gives  a 
special  significance  to  the  body  as  that  which  can  be 
moved,  and  by  the  movements  of  which  interesting  and 
highly  impressive  changes  in  the  environment,  e.g.,  bangs 
and  other  noises,  can  be  produced. 

It  is  probable  that  the  first  ideas  of  the  bodily  self  are 
ill-defined.  It  is  evident  that  the  head  and  face  are  not 
known  at  first  as  a  visible  object.  The  upper  limbs 
by  their  movement  across  the  field  of  vision  would  come 
in  for  the  special  notice  of  the  eye.  We  know  that  the 
baby  is  at  an  early  date  wont  to  watch  its  hands.  The 
lower  limbs,  moreover,  seem  to  receive  special  attention 
from  the  exploring  and  examining  hand. 

There  is  some  reason  to  think,  however,  that  in  spite  of 
these  advantages,  the  limbs  form  a  less  integral  and  essential 
part  of  the  bodily  self  than  the  trunk.  A  child  in  his  second 
year  was  observed  to  bite  his  own  finger  till  he  cried  with 
pain.  He  could  hardly  have  known  it  as  a  part  of  his 
sensitive  body.  Preyer  tells  us  of  a  boy  of  nineteen  months 
who  when  asked  to  give  his  foot  seized  it  with  both  hands 

1  For  the  facts  see  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  cap.  xxii.  ;  Tracy,  Thz 
Psychology  of  Childhood,  p.  47. 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  Ill 

and  tried  to  hand  it  over.  A  like  facility  in  casting  off 
from  the  self  or  alienating  the  limbs  is  illustrated  in  a  story 
in  the  Worcester  Collection  of  a  child  of  three  and  a  half 
years  who  on  finding  his  feet  stained  by  some  new  stock- 
ings observed:  "Oh,  mamma!  these  ain't  my  feet,  these  ain't 
the  feet  I  had  this  morning ".  This  readiness  to  detach 
the  limbs  shows  itself  still  more  plainly  in  the  boy  C.'s 
complaining  when  in  bed  and  trying  to  wriggle  into  a  snug 
position  that  his  legs  came  in  the  way  of  himself.  Here  the 
legs  seem  to  be  half  transformed  into  foreign  persons  ;  and 
this  tendency  to  personify  the  limbs  seems  to  be  further 
illustrated  in  Laura  Bridgman's  pastime  of  spelling  a  word 
wrongly  with  one  hand  and  then  slapping  that  hand  with 
the  other. 

Why,  it  may  be  asked,  should  a  child  attach  this  supreme 
importance  to  the  trunk,  when  his  limbs  are  always  forcing 
themselves  on  his  notice  by  their  movements,  and  when  he 
is  so  deeply  interested  in  them  as  the  parts  of  the  body 
which  do  things  ?  I  suspect  that  the  principal  reason  is 
that  a  child  soon  learns  to  connect  with  the  trunk  the  re- 
current and  most  impressive  of  his  feelings  of  comfort  and 
discomfort,  such  as  hunger,  thirst,  stomachic  pains  and  the 
corresponding  reliefs.  We  know  that  the  "vital  sense" 
forms  the  sensuous  basis  of  self-consciousness  in  the  adult, 
and  it  is  only  reasonable  to  suppose  that  in  the  first  years 
of  life,  when  it  fills  so  large  a  place  in  the  consciousness,  it 
has  most  to  do  with  determining  the  idea  of  the  sentient 
or  feeling  body.  Afterwards  the  observation  of  maimed 
men  and  animals  would  confirm  the  idea  that  the  trunk 
is  the  seat  and  essential  portion  of  the  living  body.  The 
language  of  others  too  by  identifying  '  body '  and  '  trunk  ' 
would  strengthen  the  tendency. 

About  this  interesting  trunk-body,  what  is  inside  it,  and 
how  it  works,  the  child  speculates  vastly.  References  to 
the  making  of  bone,  the  work  of  the  stomach,  and  so  forth 
have  to  be  understood  somehow.  It  would  be  interesting 


112  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

to  get  at  a  child's  unadulterated  view  of  his  anatomy  and 
physiology.  The  Worcester  Collection  illustrates  what 
funny  ideas  a  child  can  entertain  of  the  mechanism  of  his 
body.  A  little  girl  between  five  and  six  thought  it  was  the 
little  hairs  coming  against  the  lids  which  made  her  sleepy. 

At  a  later  stage  of  the  child's  development,  no  doubt, 
when  he  comes  to  form  the  idea  of  a  conscious  thinking 
'  I,'  the  head  will  become  a  principal  portion  of  the  bodily 
self.  In  the  evolution  of  the  self-idea  in  the  race,  too,  we 
find  that  the  soul  was  lodged  in  the  trunk  long  before  it 
was  assigned  a  seat  in  the  head.  As  may  be  seen  in  C.'s 
case  children  are  quite  capable  of  finding  their  way,  partly 
at  least,  to  the  idea  that  the  soul  has  its  lodgment  in  the 
head.  But  it  is  long  before  this  thought  grows  clear.  This 
may  be  seen  in  children's  talk,  as  when  a  girl  of  four 
spoke  of  her  dolly  as  having  no  sense  in  her  eyes.  Even 
when  a  child  learns  from  others  that  we  think  with  our 
brains  he  goes  on  supposing  that  our  thoughts  travel 
down  to  the  mouth  when  we  speak. 

Very  interesting  in  connexion  with  the  first  stages  of 
development  of  the  idea  of  self  is  the  experience  of  the 
mirror.  It  would  be  absurd  to  expect  a  child  when  first 
placed  before  a  mirror  to  recognise  his  own  face.  He  will 
smile  at  the  reflexion  as  early  as  the  tenth  week,  though 
this  is  probably  merely  an  expression  of  pleasure  at  the 
sight  of  a  bright  object.  If  held  in  the  nurse's  or  father's 
arms  to  a  glass  when  about  six  months  old  a  baby  will  at 
once  show  that  he  recognises  the  image  of  the  familiar  face 
of  the  latter  by  turning  round  to  the  real  face,  whereas  he 
does  not  recognise  his  own.  He  appears  at  first  and  for 
some  months  to  take  it  for  a  real  object,  sometimes  smiling 
to  it  as  to  a  stranger  and  even  kissing  it,  or,  as  in  the  case  of  a 
little  girl  (fifteen  months  old),  offering  it  things  and  saying 
'Ta'  (sign  of  acceptance).  In  many  cases  curiosity 
prompts  to  an  attempt  to  grasp  the  mirror-figure  with  the 
hand,  to  turn  up  the  glass,  or  to  put  the  hand  behind  it  in 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  I  I  3 

order  to  see  what  is  really  there.  This  is  very  much  like 
the  behaviour  of  monkeys  before  a  mirror,  as  described  by 
Darwin  and  others.  Little  by  little  the  child  gets  used  to 
the  reflexion,  and  then  by  noting  certain  agreements 
between  his  bodily  self  and  the  image,  as  the  movement  of 
his  hands  when  he  points,  and  partly,  too,  by  a  kind  of  infer- 
ence of  analogy  from  the  doubling  of  other  things  by  the 
mirror,  he  reaches  the  idea  that  the  reflexion  belongs  to 
himself.  By  the  sixtieth  week  Preyer's  boy  had  associated 
the  name  of  his  mother  with  her  image,  pointing  to  it  when 
asked  where  she  was.  By  the  twenty-first  month  he  did 
the  same  thing  in  the  case  of  his  own  image.1 

An  infant  will,  we  know,  take  a  shadow  to  be  a  real 
object  and  try  to  touch  it.  Some  children  on  noticing  their 
own  and  other  people's  shadows  on  the  wall  are  afraid  as 
at  something  uncanny.  Here,  too,  in  time  the  strange 
phenomenon  is  taken  as  a  matter  of  course  and  referred  to 
the  sun. 

We  are  told  that  the  phenomena  of  reflexions  and 
shadows,  along  with  those  of  dreams,  had  much  to  do  with 
the  development,  in  the  early  thought  of  the  race,  of  the 
animistic  conception  that  everything  has  a  double  nature 
and  existence.  Do  children  form  similar  ideas  ?  We  can 
see  from  the  autobiography  of  George  Sand  how  a  clever 
girl,  reflecting  on  the  impressive  experience  of  the  echo,  ex- 
cogitates such  a  theory  of  her  double  existence  ;  and  we 
know,  too,  that  the  boy  Hartley  Coleridge  distinguished 
among  the  '  Hartleys '  a  picture  Hartley  and  a  shadow 
Hartley.  C.'s  biography  suggests  that  being  photographed 
may  appear  to  a  child  as  a  transmutation,  if  not  a  doubling, 
of  the  self.  But  much  more  needs  to  be  known  about  these 
matters. 

The  prominence  of  the  bodily  pictorial  element  in  the 
child's  first  idea  of  self  is  seen  in  the  tendency  to  restrict 

1  See  the  very  full  account  of  the  mirror  experiment  in  Preyer's 
book,  p.  459  seq. 

8 


114  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

personal  identity  within  the  limits  of  an  unchanged  bodily 
appearance.  The  child  of  six,  with  his  shock  of  curls, 
refuses  to  believe  that  he  is  the  same  as  the  hairless  baby 
whose  photograph  the  mother  shows  him.  How  different, 
how  new,  a  being  a  child  feels  on  a  Sunday  morning  after 
the  extra  weekly  cleansing  and  brushing  and  draping.  The 
bodily  appearance  is  a  very  big  slice  of  the  content  of  most 
people's  self-consciousness,  and  to  the  child  it  is  almost 
everything. 

But  in  time  the  conscious  self,  which  thinks  and  suffers 
and  wills,  comes  to  be  dimly  discerned.  I  believe  that  a 
real  advance  towards  this  true  self-consciousness  is  marked 
by  the  appropriation  and  use  of  the  difficult  forms  of 
language,  'I,'  'me,'  'mine'.  This  will  be  dealt  with  in 
another  essay. 

Sometimes  the  apprehension  of  the  existence  of  a  hidden 
self  distinct  from  the  body  comes  as  a  sudden  revelation,  as 
to  little  George  Sand.  Such  a  swift  awakening  of  self- 
consciousness  is  apt  to  be  an  epoch-making  and  memorable 
moment  in  the  history  of  the  child. 

A  father  sends  me  the  following  notes  on  the  develop- 
ment of  self-consciousness :  "  My  girl,  three  years  old, 
makes  an  extraordinary  distinction  between  her  body  and 
herself.  Lying  in  bed  she  shut  her  eyes  and  said :  '  Mother, 
you  can't  see  me  now '.  The  mother  replied :  '  Oh,  you 
little  goose,  I  can  see  you  but  you  can't  see  me '.  To 
which  she  rejoined:  '  Oh,  yes,  I  know  you  can  see  my  body, 
mother,  but  you  can't  see  me\"  The  same  child  about  the 
same  time  was  concerned  about  the  reality  of  her  own 
existence.  One  day  playing  with  her  dolls  she  asked  her 
mother:  "  Mother,  am  /  real,  or  only  a  pretend  like  my 
dolls  ?  "  Here  again,  it  is  plain,  the  emphasis  was  laid  on 
something  non-corporeal,  something  that  animated  the 
body,  and  not  a  mere  bit  of  mechanism  put  inside  it.  Two 
years  later  she  showed  a  still  finer  intellectual  differen- 
tiation of  the  visible  and  the  invisible  self.  Her  brother 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  115 

happened  to  ask  her  what  they  fed  the  bears  on  at  the 
Zoo.  She  answered  impulsively:  "Dead  babies  and  that 
sort  of  thing  ".  On  this  the  motherjnterposed :  "  Why,  F., 
you  don't  think  mothers  would  give  their  dead  babies  to  the 
animals?  "  To  this  she  replied  :  "Why  not,  mother?  It's 
only  their  bodies.  I  shouldn't  mind  your  giving  mine." 
This  contempt  for  the  body  is  an  excellent  example  of  the 
way  in  which  a  child  when  he  gets  hold  of  an  idea  pushes 
it  to  its  logical  extreme.  This  little  girl  by-the-bye  was 
she  who,  about  the  same  age,  took  compassion  on  the 
poor  autumn  leaves  dying  on  the  ground,  so  that  we  may 
suppose  her  mind  to  have  been  brooding  at  this  time  on 
the  conscious  side  of  existence. 

The  mystery  of  self-existence  has  probably  been  a 
puzzle  to  many  a  thoughtful  child.  A  lady,  a  well-known 
writer  of  fiction,  sends  me  the  following  recollection  of  her 
early  thought  on  this  subject :  "  The  existence  of  other 
people  seemed  natural :  it  was  the  '  I '  that  seemed  so 
strange  to  me.  That  I  should  be  able  to  perceive,  to 
think,  to  cause  other  people  to  act,  seemed  to  me  quite  to 
be  expected,  but  the  power  of  feeling  and  acting  and 
moving  about  myself,  under  the  guidance  of  some  internal 
self,  amazed  me  continually." 

It  is  of  course  hard  to  say  how  exactly  the  child  thinks 
about  this  inner  self.  It  seems  to  me  probable  that,  allow- 
ing for  the  great  differences  in  reflective  power,  children  in 
general,  like  uncivilised  races,  tend  to  materialise  it,  think- 
ing of  it  dimly  as  a  film-like  shadow-like  likeness  of  the 
visible  self.  The  problem  is  complicated  for  the  child's 
consciousness  by  religious  instruction  with  its  idea  of  an 
undying  soul. 

As  may  be  seen  in  the  recollections  just  quoted,  this 
early  thought  about  self  is  greatly  occupied  with  its  action 
on  the  body.  Among  the  many  things  that  puzzled  the 
much-questioning  little  lad  already  frequently  quoted  was 
this :  "  How  do  my  thoughts  come  down  from  my  brain  to 


Il6  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

my  mouth  :  and  how  does  my  spirit  make  my  legs  walk  ?  " 
C.'s  sister  when  four  years  and  ten  months  old  wanted  to 
know  how  it  is  we  can  move  our  arm  and  keep  it  still  when 
we  want  to,  while  the  curtain  can't  move  except  somebody 
moves  it.  The  first  attempts  to  solve  the  puzzle  are  of 
course  materialistic,  as  may  be  seen  in  our  little  questioner's 
delightful  notion  of  thoughts  travelling  through  the  body. 
This  form  of  materialism,  however,  I  find  surviving  in 
grown-ups  and  even  in  students  of  psychology,  who  are 
rather  fond  of  talking  about  sensations  travelling  up  the 
nerves  to  the  brain. 

Very  curious  are  the  directions  of  the  first  thought 
about  the  past  self.  The  idea  of  personal  identity,  so  dear 
to  philosophers,  does  not  appear  to  be  fully  reached  at  first. 
On  the  contrary,  as  we  shall  see  in  the  case  of  C.,  the  past 
self  is  divorced  from  the  present  under  the  image  of  the 
opposite  sex  in  the  odd  expression  :  "  when  I  was  a  little 
girl".  This  probably  illustrates  the  importance  of  the 
bodily  appearance  as  a  factor  in  the  self,  for  C.  had,  I  be- 
lieve, been  photographed  when  in  the  petticoat  stage,  and  no 
doubt  looked  back  on  this  person  in  skirts  as  a  girl.  This  is 
borne  out  by  the  fact  that  another  little  boy  when  about 
three  and  a  half  years  old  asked  his  mother  :  "  Was  I  a  girl 
when  I  was  small  ?  "  and  that  the  little  questioner  whom  I 
have  called  our  zoologist  was  also  accustomed  to  say:  "When 
I  was  a  'ickle  dirl  (girl) ".  But  discarded  petticoats  do  not 
explain  all  the  child's  ideas  about  his  past  self.  This  same 
little  zoologist  would  also  say,  "  When  I  was  a  big  man, "to 
describe  the  state  of  things  long,  long  ago.  What  does 
this  mean  ?  In  discussing  the  quaint  idea  of  senile 
shrinkage  I  have  suggested  that  a  child  may  think  of 
human  existence  as  a  series  of  transformations  from  little- 
ness to  bigness,  and  the  reverse,  and  here  we  have  lighted 
on  another  apparent  evidence  of  it.  For  though  we  are 
apt  to  call  children  '  old  men '  we  do  not  suggest  to  them 
that  they  are  or  have  been  big  men. 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  1 1/ 

The  difficulty  to  the  child  of  conceiving  of  his  remote 
past,  is  surpassed  by  that  of  trying  to  understand  the  state 
of  things  before  he  was  born.  The  true  mystery  of  birth 
for  the  child,  the  mystery  which  fascinates  and  holds  his 
mind,  is  that  of  his  beginning  to  be.  This  is  illustrated 
in  C.'s  question:  "Where  was  I  a  hundred  years  ago? 
Where  was  I  before  I  was  born  ?  "  It  remains  a  mystery 
for  all  of  us,  only  that  after  a  time  we  are  wont  to  put  it 
aside.  The  child,  on  the  other  hand,  is  stung,  so  to  say, 
by  the  puzzle,  his  whole  mind  being  roused  to  passionate 
questioning. 

It  is  curious  to  note  the  differences  in  the  attitude  of 
children's  minds  towards  the  mystery.  The  small  person 
accustomed  to  petting,  to  be  made  the  centre  of  others1 
thought  and  action,  may  be  struck  with  the  blank  in  the 
common  home  life  before  his  arrival.  A  lady  was  talking 
to  her  little  girl  H.,  aged  three  years,  about  something  she 
had  done  when  she  was  a  child.  H.  then  wanted  to  know 
what  she  was  doing  then,  and  was  told  by  her  mother : 
"Oh,  you  were  not  here  at  all".  She  seemed  quite 
amazed  at  this,  and  said  :  "  And  what  did  you  do  without 
H.  ?  Did  you  cry  all  day  for  her  ?  "  On  being  informed 
that  this  was  not  the  case,  she  seemed  quite  unable  to 
realise  how  her  mother  could  have  existed  without  her. 
There  is  something  of  the  charming  egoism  of  the 
child  here,  but  there  is  more  :  there  is  the  vague  expression 
of  the  unifying  integrating  work  of  love.  Lovers,  one  is 
told,  are  wont  to  think  in  the  same  way  about  the  past 
before  they  met,  and  became  all  in  all  to  one  another. 
For  this  little  girl  with  her  strong  sense  of  human  attach- 
ment, the  idea  of  a  real  life  without  that  which  gave  it 
warmth  and  gladness  was  a  contradiction. 

Sometimes  again,  in  the  more  metaphysical  sort  of 
child,  the  puzzle  relates  to  the  past  existence  of  the  outer 
world.  We  have  all  been  perplexed  by  the  thought  of 
the  earth  and  sky,  and  other  folk  existing  before  we  were, 


Il8  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

and  going  on  to  exist  after  we  cease  to  be ;  though  here 
again,  save  in  the  case  of  the  philosopher  perhaps,  we  get 
used  to  the  puzzle.  Children  may  be  deeply  impressed 
with  this  apparent  contradiction.  Jean  Ingelow  in  her 
interesting  reminiscences  thus  writes  of  her  puzzlings  on 
this  head  :  "  I  went  through  a  world  of  cogitation  as  to 
whether  it  was  really  true  that  anything  had  been  and 
lived  before  I  was  there  to  see  it.  ...  I  could  think  there 
might  have  been  some  day  when  I  was  very  little — as 
small  as  the  most  tiny  pebble  on  the  road — but  not  to  have 
been  at  all  was  so  very  hard  to  believe."  A  little  boy  of 
five  who  was  rather  given  to  saying  '  clever '  things,  was 
one  day  asked  by  a  visitor,  who  thought  to  rebuke  what 
she  took  to  be  his  conceit :  "Why,  M.,  however  did  the 
world  go  round  before  you  came  into  it?"  M.  at  once 
replied:  "  Why,  it  didn't  go  round.  It  only  began  five  years 
ago."  Was  this,  as  perhaps  nine  persons  out  of  ten  would 
say,  merely  a  bit  of  dialectic  smartness,  the  evasion  of  an 
awkward  question  by  denying  the  assumed  fact?  I  am 
disposed  to  think  that  there  was  more,  that  the  virtuous 
intention  of  the  visitor  had  chanced  to  discover  a  hidden 
child-thought ;  for  the  child  is  naturally  a  Berkeleyan,  in 
so  far  at  least  that  for  him  the  reality  of  things  is  reality 
for  his  own  sense-perceptions.  A  world  existent  before  he 
was  on  the  spot  to  see  it,  seems  to  the  child's  intelligence 
a  contradiction. 

A  child  will  sometimes  use  theological  ideas  as  an 
escape  from  this  puzzle.  The  myth  of  babies  being 
brought  down  from  heaven  is  particularly  helpful.  The 
quick  young  intelligence  sees  in  this  pretty  idea  a  way  of 
prolonging  existence  backwards.  The  same  little  boy 
that  was  so  concerned  to  know  what  his  mother  had 
done  without  him,  happened  one  day  to  be  passing  a 
street  pump  with  his  mother,  when  he  stopped  and 
observed  with  perfect  gravity :  "  There  are  no  pumps 
in  heaven  where  I  came  from".  He  had  evidently  thought 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  119 

out  the  legend  of  the  God-sent  baby  to  its  logical  con- 
sequences. 

Children  appear  to  have  very  vague  ideas  about  time. 
Their  minds  cannot  at  first  of  course  rise  to  the  abstraction, 
time,  or  duration,  or  to  its  measured  portions,  as  a  day. 
They  talk  about  the  days  as  if  they  were  things.  Thus 
to-day,  yesterday,  and  to-morrow,  which,  as  we  may  see 
in  C.'s  way  of  talking  about  time,  are  used  very  vaguely 
for  present,  past  and  future,  are  spoken  of  as  things  which 
move.  A  girl  of  four  asked :  '  Where  is  yesterday  gone  to  ?  ' 
and  '  Where  will  to-morrow  come  from  ?  '  The  boy  C. 
as  well  as  other  children,  as  we  saw,  asked  where  all  the 
days  go  to.  Such  expressions  may  of  course  be  figurative, 
a  child  having  no  other  way  of  describing  the  sequence 
yesterday  and  to-day,  to-day  and  to-morrow  ;  yet  I  am 
disposed  to  think  that  these  are  examples  of  the  child's 
'  concretism,'  his  reduction  of  our  abstractions  to  living 
realities.1 

It  is  equally  noticeable  that  children  have  no  adequate 
mental  representations  of  our  time-measurements.  As  in 
the  case  of  space,  so  in  that  of  time  their  standard  is  not 
ours :  an  hour,  say  the  first  morning  at  school,  may  seem 
an  eternity  to  a  child's  consciousness.  The  days,  the 
months,  the  years  seem  to  fly  faster  and  faster  as  we  get 
older.  On  the  other  hand,  as  in  the  case  of  space-judg- 
ments, too,  the  child  through  his  inability  to  represent 
time  on  a  large  scale  is  apt  to  bring  the  past  too  near  the 
present.  Mothers  and  young  teachers  would  be  surprised 
if  they  knew  how  children  interpreted  their  first  historical 
instruction  introduced  by  the  common  phrase,  '  Many  years 
ago,'  or  similar  expression.  A  child  of  six  years  when 
crossing  the  Red  Sea  asked  to  be  shown  Pharaoh  and  his 
hosts.  This  looks  like  the  effect  of  a  vivid  imagination  of 

1  A  child  quoted  by  P.  Lombroso  thought  of  a  year  as  a  round 
thing  having  the  different  festivals  on  it,  and  bringing  these  round  in 
due  order  by  its  rotation  (op.  cit.,  p.  49). 


120  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  scene,  which  even  in  grown  people  may  beget  an 
expectation  of  seeing  it  here  and  now.  The  following 
anecdote  of  a  boy  of  five  and  a  half  years  sent  me  by  his 
aunt  more  clearly  illustrates  a  child's  idea  of  the  historical 
past.  "  H.  was  beginning  to  have  English  history  read  to 
him  and  had  got  past  the  '  Romans '  as  he  said.  One  day 
he  noticed  a  locket  on  my  watch-chain,  and  desired  that  it 
should  be  opened.  It  contained  the  hair  of  two  babies 
both  dead  long  before.  He  asked  about  them.  I  told 
him  they  died  before  I  was  born.  '  Did  father  know 
them?'  he  asked.  'No,  they  died  before  he  was  born.' 
4  Then  who  knew  them  and  when  did  they  live  ? '  he  asked, 
and  as  I  hesitated  for  a  moment,  seeking  how  to  make  the 
matter  plain,  '  Was  it  in  the  time  of  the  Romans  ? '  he 
gravely  asked."  The  odd-looking  historical  perspective 
here  was  quite  natural.  He  had  to  localise  the  babies' 
existence  somewhere,  and  he  could  only  do  it  conjecturally 
by  reference  to  the  one  far-off  time  of  which  he  had  heard, 
and  which  presumably  covered  all  that  was  before  the 
life-time  of  himself  and  of  those  about  him. 

Theological  Ideas. 

We  may  now  pass  to  another  group  of  children's  ideas, 
a  group  already  alluded  to,  those  which  have  to  do  with 
the  invisible  world,  with  death  and  what  follows  this — God 
and  heaven.  Here  we  find  an  odd  patchwork  of  thought, 
the  patchwork-look  being  due  to  the  heterogeneous  sources 
of  the  child's  information,  his  own  observations  of  the 
visible  world  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  ideas  supplied  him 
by  what  is  called  religious  instruction  on  the  other.  The 
characteristic  activity  of  the  child-mind,  so  far  as  we  can 
disengage  it,  is  seen  in  the  attempt  to  co-ordinate  the  dis- 
parate and  seemingly  contradictory  ideas  into  something 
like  a  coherent  system. 

Like  the  beginning  of  life,  its  termination,  death,  is  one 
of  the  recurring  puzzles  of  childhood.  This  might  be 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  121 

illustrated  from  almost  any  autobiographical  reminiscences 
of  childhood.  Here  indeed  the  mystery,  as  may  be  seen 
in  C.'s  case,  is  made  the  more  impressive  and  recurrent  to 
consciousness  by  the  element  of  dread.  A  little  girl  of 
three  and  a  half  years  asked  her  mother  to  put  a  great 
stone  on  her  head,  because  she  did  not  want  to  die.  She 
was  asked  how  a  stone  would  prevent  it,  and  answered  with 
perfect  childish  logic :  "  Because  I  shall  not  grow  tall  if  you 
put  a  great  stone  on  my  head  ;  and  people  who  grow  tall 
get  old  and  then  die  ". 

Death  seems  to  be  thought  of  by  the  unsophisticated 
child  as  the  body  reduced  to  a  motionless  state,  devoid  of 
breath  and  unable  any  longer  to  feel  or  think.  This  is 
the  idea  suggested  by  the  sight  of  dead  animals,  which  but 
few  children,  however  closely  shielded,  can  escape. 

The  first  way  of  envisaging  death  seems  to  be  as  a 
temporary  state  like  sleep,  which  it  so  closely  resembles. 
A  little  boy  of  two  and  a  half  years,  on  hearing  from  his 
mother  of  the  death  of  a  lady  friend,  at  once  asked:  "  Will 
Mrs.  P.  still  be  dead  when  we  go  back  to  London  ?  " 

The  knowledge  of  burial  gives  a  new  and  terrible  turn 
to  his  idea  of  death.  He  now  begins  to  speculate  much 
about  the  grave.  The  instinctive  tendency  to  carry  over 
the  idea  of  life  and  sentience  to  the  buried  body  is 
illustrated  in  C.'s  fear  lest  the  earth  should  be  put  over  his 
eyes.  The  following  observation  from  the  Worcester  Col- 
lection illustrates  the  same  tendency.  "  A  few  days  ago 
H.  (aged  four  years  four  months)  came  to  me  and  said  : 
4  Did  you  know  they'd  taken  Deacon  W.  to  Grafton  ?  '  I. 
*  Yes.'  H.  '  Well,  I  s'pose  it's  the  best  thing.  His  folks 
(meaning  his  children)  are  buried  there,  and  they  wouldn't 
know  he  was  dead  if  he  was  buried  here.'  "  This  reversion 
to  savage  notions  of  the  dead  in  speaking  of  a  Christian 
deacon  has  a  certain  grim  humour.  All  thoughts  of 
heaven  were  here  forgotten  in  the  absorbing  interest  in 
the  fate  of  the  body. 


122  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

Do  children  when  left  to  themselves  work  out  a  theory 
of  another  life,  that  of  the  soul  away  from  the  dead  de- 
serted body?  It  is  of  course  difficult  to  say,  all  children 
receiving  some  instruction  at  least  of  a  religious  character 
respecting  the  future.  One  of  the  clearest  approaches  to 
spontaneous  child-thought  that  I  have  met  with  here  is 
supplied  by  the  account  of  the  Boston  children.  "  Many 
children  (writes  Professor  Stanley  Hall)  locate  all  that  is 
good  and  imperfectly  known  in  the  country,  and  nearly  a 
dozen  volunteered  the  statement  that  good  people  when 
they  die  go  to  the  country — even  here  from  Boston."  The 
reference  to  good  people  shows  that  the  children  are  here 
trying  to  give  concrete  definiteness  to  something  that  has 
been  said  by  another.  These  children  had  not,  one  sus- 
pects, received  much  systematic  religious  instruction.  They 
had  perhaps  gathered  in  a  casual  way  the  information 
that  good  people  when  they  die  are  to  go  to  a  nice  place. 
Children  pick  up  much  from  the  talk  of  their  better-in- 
structed companions  which  they  only  half  understand.  In 
any  case  it  is  interesting  to  note  that  they  placed  their 
heaven  in  the  country,  the  unknown  beautiful  region,  where 
all  sorts  of  luxuries  grow.  One  is  reminded  of  the  idea  of 
the  happy  hunting  grounds  to  which  the  American  Indian 
consigns  his  dead  chief.  It  would  have  been  interesting 
to  examine  these  Boston  children  as  to  how  they  combined 
this  belief  in  going  to  the  country  with  the  burial  of  the 
body  in  the  city. 

In  the  case  of  children  who  pick  up  something  of  the 
orthodox  religious  creed  the  idea  of  going  to  heaven  has 
somehow  to  be  grasped  and  put  side  by  side  with  that  of 
burial.  How  the  child-mind  behaves  here  it  is  hard  to 
say.  It  is  probable  that  there  are  many  comfortable  and 
stupid  children  who  are  not  troubled  by  any  appearance  of 
contradiction.  As  we  saw  in  the  remark  of  the  American 
child  about  the  deacon,  the  child-mind  may  oscillate  be- 
tween the  native  idea  that  the  man  lives  on  in  a  sense 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  123 

underground,  and  the  alien  idea  that  he  has  passed  into 
heaven.  Yet  undoubtedly  the  more  thoughtful  kind  of 
child  does  try  to  bring  the  two  ideas  into  agreement.  The 
boy  C.  attempted  to  do  this  first  of  all  by  supposing  that 
the  people  who  went  to  heaven  (the  good)  were  not  buried 
at  all ;  and  later  by  postponing  the  going  to  heaven,  the 
true  entrance  being  that  of  the  body  by  way  of  the  tomb. 
Other  ways  of  getting  a  consistent  view  of  things  are 
also  hit  upon.  Thus  a  little  girl  of  five  years  thought 
that  the  head  only  passed  to  heaven.  This  was  no  doubt  a 
way  of  understanding  the  communication  from  others  that 
the  '  body '  is  buried.  This  inference  is  borne  out  by 
another  story  of  a  boy  of  four  and  a  half  who  asked  how 
much  of  his  legs  would  have  to  be  cut  off  when  he  was 
buried.  The  legs  were  not  the  'body'.  But  the  idea  of  the 
head  passing  to  heaven  meant  more  than  this.  It  pretty 
certainly  involved  a  localisation  of  the  soul  in  the  crown  of 
the  body,  and  it  may  possibly  have  been  helped  by  pictures 
of  cherub  heads.  Sometimes  this  process  of  child-thought 
reflects  that  of  early  human  thought,  as  when  a  little  boy 
of  six  said  that  God  took  the  breath  to  heaven  (cf.  the 
ideas  underlying  spiritus  and  Trvevfia}. 

In  what  precise  manner  children  imagine  the  entrance 
into  heaven  to  take  place  I  do  not  feel  certain.  The  legend 
of  being  borne  by  angels  through  the  air  probably  assists 
here.  As  we  have  seen,  children  tend  to  think  of  people 
when  they  die  as  shrinking  back  to  baby-dimensions  so  as 
to  be  carried  in  the  angels'  arms. 

The  idea  of  people  going  to  heaven  is,  as  we  know, 
pushed  by  the  little  brain  to  its  logical  consequences. 
Animals  when  they  die  pass  to  another  place  also.  A  boy 
three  years  and  nine  months  asked  whether  birds,  insects, 
and  so  forth  go  to  heaven  where  people  go  when  they  die. 
Yet  a  materialistic  tendency  shows  itself  here,  especially  in 
connexion  with  the  observation  that  animals  are  eaten. 
A  little  American  boy  in  his  fifth  year  was  playing 


124  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

with  a  tadpole  till  it  died.  Immediately  the  other  tad- 
poles ate  it  up,  and  the  child  burst  out  crying.  His  elder 
sister  with  the  best  of  intentions  tried  to  comfort  him  by 
saying :  '  Don't  cry,  William,  he's  gone  to  a  better  place '. 
To  which  rather  ill-timed  assurance  he  retorted  sceptically  : 
'  Are  his  brothers  and  sisters'  stomachs  a  better  place  ? ' 

Coming  now  to  ideas  of  supernatural  beings,  it  is  to  be 
noted  that  children  do  not  wholly  depend  for  their  con- 
ceptions of  these  on  religious  or  other  instruction.  The 
liveliness  of  their  imagination  and  their  impulses  of  dread 
and  trust  push  them  on  to  a  spontaneous  creation  of  in- 
visible beings.  In  C.'s  haunting  belief  in  the  wolf  we  see 
a  sort  of  survival  of  the  tendency  of  the  savage  to  people 
the  unseen  world  with  monsters  in  the  shape  of  demons. 
Another  little  boy  of  rather  more  than  two  years  who  had 
received  no  religious  instruction  acquired  a  similar  haunt- 
ing dread  of '  cocky,'  the  name  he  had  given  to  the  cocks 
and  hens  when  in  the  country.  He  localised  this  evil 
thing  in  the  bathroom  of  the  house,  and  he  attributed 
pains  in  the  stomach  to  the  malign  influence  of  'cocky'.1 
Fear  created  the  gods  according  to  Lucretius,  and  in  this 
invention  of  evil  beings  bent  on  injuring  him  the  child  of  a 
modern  civilised  community  may  reproduce  the  process  by 
which  man's  thoughts  were  first  troubled  by  the  apprehen- 
sion of  invisible  and  supernatural  agents. 

On  the  other  hand  we  find  that  the  childish  impulse  to 
seek  aid  leads  to  a  belief  in  a  more  benign  sort  of  being. 
C.'s  staunch  belief  in  his  fairies  who  could  do  the  most 
wonderful  things  for  him,  and  more  especially  his  invention 
of  the  rain-god  (the  "  Rainer  "),  are  a  clear  illustration  of 
the  working  of  this  impulse. 

Even  here,  of  course,  while  we  can  detect  the  play  of  a 
spontaneous  impulse,  we  have  to  recognise  the  influence 
of  instruction.  C.'s  tutelary  deities,  the  fairies,  were  no  doubt 
suggested  by  his  fairy  stories  ;  even  though,  as  in  the  myth 

1  See  Mind,  vol.  xi.,  p.  149. 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  125 

of  the  Rainer,  we  see  how  his  active  little  mind  proceeded 
to  work  out  the  hints  given  him  into  quite  original  shapes. 
This  original  adaptation  shows  itself  on  a  large  scale  where 
something  like  systematic  religious  instruction  is  supplied. 
An  intelligent  child  of  four  or  five  will  in  the  laboratory  of 
his  mind  turn  the  ideas  of  God  and  the  devil  to  strange 
account.  It  would  be  interesting,  if  we  could  only  get  it,  to 
have  a  collection  of  all  the  hideous  eerie  forms  by  which  the 
young  imagination  has  endeavoured  to  interpret  the  notion 
of  the  devil.  His  renderings  of  the  idea  of  God  appear 
to  show  hardly  less  of  picturesque  diversity.1 

It  is  to  be  noted  at  the  outset  that  for  the  child's  intelli- 
gence the  ideas  introduced  by  religious  instruction  at  once 
graft  themselves  on  to  those  of  fairy-lore.  Mr.  Spencer 
has  somewhere  ridiculed  our  university  type  of  education 
with  its  juxtaposition  of  classical  polytheism  and  Hebrew 
monotheism.  One  might,  perhaps,  with  still  greater  reason, 
satirise  the  mixing  up  of  fairy-story  and  Bible-story  in  the 
instruction  of  a  child  of  five.  Who  can  wonder  that  the  little 
brain  should  throw  together  all  these  wondrous  invisible 
forms,  and  picture  God  as  an  angry  or  amiable  old  giant, 
the  angels  as  fairies  and  so  forth  ?  In  George  Sand's  child- 
romance  of  Corambe  we  see  how  far  this  blending  of  the 
ideas  of  the  two  domains  of  the  invisible  world  can  be 
carried. 

For  the  rest,  the  child  in  his  almost  pathetic  effort  to 
catch  the  meaning  of  this  religious  instruction  proceeds  in 
his  characteristic  matter-of-fact  way  by  reducing  the  abstruse 
symbols  to  terms  of  familiar  every-day  experience.  He  has 
to  understand  and  he  can  only  understand  by  assimilating  to 
homely  terrestrial  facts.  Hence  the  undisguised  materialism 
of  the  child's  theology.  According  to  Stanley  Hall's 

1  According  to  Professor  Earl  Barnes,  the  Californian  children  seem 
to  occupy  themselves  but  little  with  the  devil  and  hell.  See  his  inter- 
esting paper,  "  Theological  Life  of  a  Californian  Child,"  Pedagogical 
Seminary,  ii.,  3,  p.  442  seq. 


126  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

collection  of  observations,  God  was  imaged  by  one  child  as  a 
man  preternaturally  big — a  big  blue  man  ;  by  another  as  a 
huge  being  with  limbs  spread  all  over  the  sky  ;  by  another 
as  so  immensely  tall  that  he  could  stand  with  one  foot  on 
the  ground,  and  touch  the  clouds, — strong  like  the  giant,  his 
prototype.    He  is  commonly,  in  conformity  with  what  is  told, 
supposed  to  dwell  in  heaven,  that  is  just  the  other  side  of 
the  blue  and  white  floor,  the  sky.     He  is  so  near  the  clouds 
that  according   to   one   small    boy    (our   little   friend    the 
zoologist)  these  are  a  sort  of  pleasaunce,  composed  of  hills 
and  trees,  which  he  has    made  to  saunter  in.      But  some 
children  are  inventive  even  in  respect  of  God's  whereabouts. 
He  has  been  regarded  as  inhabiting  one  of  the  stars.     One 
of  Mr.  Kratz's  children  localised  him  '  up  in  the  moon,'  an 
idea  which  probably  owes  something  to  observation  of  the 
man  in  the  moon.     We  note,  too,  a  tendency  to  approxi- 
mate heaven  and  earth,  possibly  in   order  to  account  for 
God's  frequent  presence  and  activity  here.     Thus  one  of 
Mr.  Kratz's  children  said  that  God  was  "  up  on  the  hill," 
and   one   little  girl  of  five  was  in    the  habit   of  climbing 
an  old  apple  tree  to  visit  him  and  tell  him  what  she  wanted. 
Differences   of   feeling,   as    well    as   differences    in  the 
mode  of  instruction  and  in  intelligence,  seem  to  reflect  them- 
selves in  these  ideas  of  the  divine  dwelling-place.     As  we 
have  seen,  the  childish  intelligence  is  apt  to  envisage  God 
as  a  sort  of  grand  lord  with  a  house   or   mansion.     Two 
different  tendencies  show  themselves  in  the  thought  about 
this  dwelling-place.    On  the  one  hand  the  feeling  of  childish 
respect,  which  led   a  German   girl  of  seven  to  address  him 
in  the  polite  form,  '  Ich  bitte  Sie,'  leads  to  a  beautifying  of 
his  house.     According  to  some  of  the  Bostonian  children 
he  has  birds,  children,  and   Santa  Claus  living  with  him. 
Others  think  of  him  as  having  a  big  park  or  pleasaunce 
with  trees,   flowers,  as    well    as  birds.     The  children    are 
perhaps  our  dead  people  who  in  time  will  be  sent  back  to 
earth.     Whether  the  birds,  that  I  find  come  in  again  and 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  \2J 

again  in  the  ideas  of  heaven,  are  dead  birds,  I  am  not  sure. 
While  however  there  is  this  half-poetical  adorning  of  God's 
palace,  we  see  also  a  tendency  to  humanise  it,  to  make  it 
like  our  familiar  houses.  This  is  quaintly  illustrated  in  the 
following  prayer  of  a  girl  of  seven  whose  grandfather  had 
just  died :  "  Please,  God,  grandpapa  has  gone  to  you. 
Please  take  great  care  of  him.  Please  always  mind  and 
shut  the  door,  because  he  can't  stand  the  draughts."  We  see 
the  same  leaning  to  homely  conceptions  in  the  question  of 
a  little  girl  of  four  :  '  Isn't  there  a  Mrs.  God  ? ' 

While  thus  relegated  to  the  sublime  regions  of  the  sky 
God  is  supposed  to  be  doing  things,  and  of  course  doing 
them  for  us,  sending  down  rain  and  so  forth.  What  seems 
to  impress  children  most,  especially  boys,  in  the  traditional 
account  of  God  is  his  power  of  making  things.  He  is 
emphatically  the  artificer,  the  demiurgos,  who  not  only  has 
made  the  world,  the  stars,  etc.,  but  is  still  kept  actively 
employed  by  human  needs.  According  to  the  Boston 
children  he  fabricates  all  sorts  of  things  from  babies  to 
money,  and  the  angels  work  for  him.  The  boy  has  a  great 
admiration  for  the  maker,  and  our  small  zoologist  when 
three  years  and  ten  months  old,  on  seeing  a  group  of  work- 
ing men  returning  from  their  work,  asked  his  astonished 
mother  :  "  Mamma,  is  these  gods  ?  "  "  God  !  "  retorted  his 
mother,  "  why  ?  "  "  Because,"  he  went  on,  "  they  makes 
houses,  and  churches,  mamma,  same  as  God  makes  moons, 
and  people,  and  'ickle  dogs."  Another  child  watching  a 
man  repairing  the  telegraph  wires  that  rested  on  a  high 
pole  at  the  top  of  a  lofty  house,  asked  if  he  was  God.  In 
this  way  the  child  is  apt  to  think  of  God  descending  to 
earth  in  order  to  make  things.  Indeed,  in  their  prayers, 
children  are  wont  to  summon  God  as  a  sort  of  good  genius 
to  do  something  difficult  for  them.  A  boy  of  four  and  a 
half  years  was  one  day  in  the  kitchen  with  his  mother,  and 
would  keep  taking  up  the  knives  and  using  them.  At  last 
his  mother  said  :  "  L.,  you  will  cut  your  fingers,  and  if  you 


128  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

do  they  won't  grow  again  ".  He  thought  for  a  minute  and 
then  said  with  a  tone  of  deep  conviction  :  "  But  God  would 
make  them  grow.  He  made  me,  so  he  could  mend  my 
fingers,  and  if  I  were  to  cut  the  ends  off  I  should  say,  '  God, 
God,  come  to  your  work,'  and  he  would  say,  '  All  right  V'1 

While  this  way  of  recognising  God  as  the  busy  artificer 
is  common,  it  is  not  universal.  The  child's  deity,  like  the 
man's  (as  Feuerbach  showed),  is  a  projection  of  himself, 
and  as  there  are  lazy  children,  so  there  is  a  child's  God 
who  is  a  luxurious  person  sitting  in  a  lovely  arm-chair  all 
clay,  and  at  most  putting  out  from  heaven  the  moon  and 
stars  at  night. 

This  admiration  of  God's  creative  power  is  naturally 
accompanied  by  that  of  his  skill.  A  little  boy  once 
said  to  his  mother  he  would  like  to  go  to  heaven  to  see 
Jesus.  Asked  why,  he  replied  :  "  Oh  !  he's  a  great  conjurer". 
The  child  had  shortly  before  seen  some  human  conjuring 
and  used  this  experience  in  a  thoroughly  childish  fashion 
by  envisaging  in  a  new  light  the  New  Testament  miracle- 
worker. 

The  idea  of  God's  omniscience  seems  to  come  naturally 
to  children.  They  are  in  the  way  of  looking  up  to  older 
folks  as  possessing  boundless  information.  C.'s  belief  in 
the  all-knowingness  of  the  preacher,  and  his  sister's  belief 
in  the  all-knowingness  of  the  policeman,  show  how  readily 
the  child-mind  falls  in  with  the  notion. 

On  the  other  hand  I  have  heard  of  the  dogma  of  God's 
infinite  knowledge  provoking  a  sceptical  attitude  in  the 
child-mind.  This  seems  to  be  suggested  in  a  rather  rude 
remark  of  a  boy  of  four,  bored  by  the  long  Sunday  dis- 

1  To  judge  from  a  story  for  the  truth  of  which  I  will  not  vouch 
children  will  turn  the  devil  to  the  same  useful  account.  A  little  girl 
was  observed  to  write  a  letter  and  to  bury  it  in  the  ground.  The  con- 
tents ran  something  like  this  :  "  Dear  Devil,  please  come  and  take 
aunt — soon,  I  cannot  stand  her  much  longer".  The  burying  is  sig- 
nificant of  the  devil's  dwelling-place. 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  129 

course  of  his  mother  :  "  Mother,  does  God  know  when  you 
are  going  to  stop  ?  "  Our  astute  little  zoologist,  when  five 
years  and  seven  months  old,  in  a  talk  with  his  mother,  im- 
piously sought  to  tone  down  the  doctrine  of  omniscience  in 
this  way  :  "  I  know  a  'ickle  more  than  Kitty,  and  you  know 
a  'ickle  more  than  me  ;  and  God  knows  a  'ickle  more  than 
you,  I  s'pose  ;  then  he  can't  know  so  very  much  after  all  ". 
Another  of  the  divine  attributes  does  undoubtedly  shock 
the  childish  intelligence :  I  mean  God's  omnipresence.  It 
seems,  indeed,  amazing  that  the  so-called  instructor  of 
the  child  should  talk  to  him  almost  in  the  same  breath 
about  God's  inhabiting  heaven,  and  about  his  being  every- 
where present.  Here,  I  think,  we  see  most  plainly  the 
superiority  of  the  child's  mind  to  the  adult's,  in  that  it  does 
not  let  contradictory  ideas  lie  peacefully  side  by  side,  but 
makes  them  face  one  another.  To  the  child,  as  we  have 
seen,  God  lives  in  the  sky,  though  he  is  quite  capable  of 
coming  down  to  earth  when  he  wishes  or  when  he  is  politely 
asked  to  do  so.  Hence  he  rejects  the  idea  of  a  diffused 
ubiquitous  existence.  The  idea  which  is  apt  to  be  intro- 
duced early  as  a  moral  instrument,  that  God  can  always  see 
the  child,  is  especially  resented  by  that  small,  sensitive, 
proud  creature,  to  whom  the  ever-following  eyes  of  the 
portrait  on  the  wall  seem  a  persecution.  Miss  Shinn,  a 
careful  American  observer  of  children,  has  written  strongly, 
yet  not  too  strongly,  on  the  repugnance  of  the  child-mind 
to  this  idea  of  an  ever-spying  eye.1  My  observations  fully 
confirm  her  conclusions  here.  Miss  Shinn  speaks  of  a  little 
girl,  who,  on  learning  that  she  was  under  this  constant 
surveillance,  declared  that  she  "would  not  be  so  tagged". 
A  little  English  boy  of  three,  on  being  informed  by  his 
older  sister  that  God  can  see  and  watch  us  while  we  cannot 
see  him,  thought  awhile,  and  then  in  an  apologetic  tone 
said  :  "  I'm  very  sorry,  dear,  I  can't  (b)elieve  you  ".  What 
the  sister,  aged  fifteen,  thought  of  this  is  not  recorded.  An 

1  Overland  Monthly,  Jan.,  1894,  p.  12. 
9 


130  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

American  boy  of  five,  learning  that  God  was  in  the  room 
and  could  see  even  if  the  shutters  were  closed,  said :  "  I  know, 
it's  jugglery  ". 

When  the  idea  is  accepted  odd  devices  are  excogitated 
for  the  purpose  of  making  it  intelligible.  Thus  one  child 
thought  of  God  as  a  very  small  person  who  could  easily 
pass  through  the  keyhole.  The  idea  of  God's  huge  frame- 
work illustrated  above  is  probably  the  result  of  an  attempt 
to  figure  the  conception  of  omnipresence.  Curious  conclusions 
too  are  sometimes  drawn  from  the  supposition.  Thus  a  little 
girl  of  three  years  and  nine  months  one  day  said  to  her 
mother  in  the  abrupt  childish  manner  :  "  Mr.  C.  (a  gentle- 
man she  had  known  who  had  just  died)  is  in  this  room  ". 
Her  mother,  naturally  a  good  deal  startled,  answered:  "  Oh, 
no!"  Whereupon  the  child  resumed:  "  Yes,  he  is.  You 
told  me  he  is  with  God,  and  you  told  me  God  was  every- 
where, so  as  Mr.  C.  is  with  God  he  must  be  in  this  room." 
With  such  trenchant  logic  does  the  child's  intelligence  cut 
through  the  tangle  of  incongruous  ideas  which  we  try  to  pass 
off  as  methodical  instruction. 

It  might  easily  be  supposed  that  the  child's  readiness  to 
pray  to  God  is  inconsistent  with  what  has  just  been  said. 
Yet  I  think  there  is  no  real  inconsistency.  Children's  idea 
of  prayer  is,  probably,  that  of  sending  a  message  to  some 
one  at  a  distance.  The  epistolary  manner  noticeable  in 
many  prayers  seems  to  illustrate  this.1  The  mysterious 
whispering  is,  I  suspect,  supposed  in  some  inscrutable 
fashion  known  only  to  the  child  to  transmit  itself  to  the 
divine  ear. 

Of  the  child's  belief  in  God's  goodness  it  is  needless  to 
say  much.  For  these  little  worshippers  he  is  emphatically 
the  friend  in  need  who  can  help  them  out  of  their  difficulties 
in  a  hundred  ways.  Our  small  zoologist  thanked  God  for 
making  "  the  sea,  the  holes  with  crabs  in  them,  and  the 
trees,  the  fields,  and  the  flowers,"  and  regretted  that  he  did 

1  C/.  the  story  of  writing  a  letter  to  the  devil  given  above. 


PRODUCTS   OF   CHILD-THOUGHT.  131 

not  follow  up  the  making  of  the  animals  we  eat  by  doing 
the  cooking  also.  As  their  prayers  show  he  is  ever  ready 
to  make  nice  presents,  from  a  fine  day  to  a  toy-gun,  and 
will  do  them  any  kindness  if  only  they  ask  prettily.  Happy 
the  reign  of  this  untroubled  optimism.  For  many  children, 
alas,  it  is  all  too  short,  the  colour  of  their  life  making  them 
lose  faith  in  all  kindness,  and  think  of  God  as  cross  and 
•even  as  cruel. 

One  of  the  real  difficulties  of  theology  for  the  child's 
intelligence  is  the  doctrine  of  God's  eternity.  Puzzled  at 
first  with  the  fact  of  his  own  beginning,  he  comes  soon  to 
be  troubled  with  the  idea  of  God's  having  had  no  begin- 
ning. C.  showed  a  common  trend  of  childish  thought  in 
asking  what  God  was  like  in  his  younger  days.  The 
question,  "  Who  made  God  ?  "  seems  to  be  one  to  which 
all  inquiring  young  minds  are  led  at  a  certain  stage  of 
child-thought.  The  metaphysical  impulse  of  the  child  to 
follow  back  the  chain  of  events  ad  infinitum  finds  the  ever- 
existent  unchanging  God  very  much  in  the  way.  He 
wants  to  get  behind  this  "  always  was  "  of  God's  existence, 
just  as  at  an  earlier  stage  of  his  development  he  wanted 
to  get  behind  the  barrier  of  the  blue  hills.  This  is  quaintly 
illustrated  in  the  reasoning  of  a  child  observed  by  M. 
Egger.  Having  learnt  from  his  mother  that  before  the 
world  there  was  only  God  the  Creator,  he  asked  :  "  And 
before  God?"  The  mother  having  replied,  "Nothing," 
he  at  once  interpreted  her  answer  by  saying  :  "  No  ;  there 
must  have  been  the  place  (i.e.,  the  empty  space)  where 
God  is  ".  So  determined  is  the  little  mind  to  get  back  to 
the  '  before,'  and  to  find  something,  if  only  a  prepared 
place. 

Other  mysteries  of  which  the  child  comes  to  hear  find 
their  characteristic  solution  in  the  busy  little  brain.  A 
friend  tells  me  that  when  a  child  he  was  much  puzzled  by 
the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity.  He  happened  to  be  an  only 
•child,  and  so  he  was  led  to  put  a  meaning  into  it  by 


132  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

assimilating  it  to  the  family  group,  in  which  the  Holy  Ghost 
became  the  mother. 

I  have  tried  to  show  that  children  seek  to  bring 
meaning,  and  a  consistent  meaning,  into  the  jumble  of 
communications  about  the  unseen  world  to  which  they 
are  apt  to  be  treated.  I  agree  with  Miss  Shinn  that 
children  about  three  and  four  are  not  disposed  to  theo- 
logise,  and  are  for  the  most  part  simply  confused  by  the 
accounts  of  God  which  they  receive.  Many  of  the  less 
bright  of  these  small  minds  may  remain  untroubled  by  the 
incongruities  lurking  in  the  mixture  of  ideas,  half  mytho- 
logical or  poetical,  half  theological,  which  is  thus  intro- 
duced. Such  children  are  no  worse  than  many  adults,  who- 
have  a  wonderful  power  of  entertaining  contradictory  ideas 
by  keeping  them  safely  apart  in  separate  chambers  of  their 
brain.  The  intelligent  thoughtful  child  on  the  other  hand 
tries  at  least  to  reconcile  and  to  combine  in  an  intelligible 
whole.  His  mind  has  not,  like  that  of  so  many  adults, 
become  habituated  to  the  water-tight  compartment  arrange- 
ment, in  which  there  is  no  possibility  of  a  leakage  of  ideas 
from  one  group  into  another.  Hence  his  puzzlings,  his 
questionings,  his  brave  attempts  to  reduce  the  chaos  to 
order.  I  think  it  is  about  time  to  ask  whether  parents  are 
doing  wisely  in  thus  adding  to  the  perplexing  problems 
of  early  days. 


133 


V. 

THE  LITTLE  LINGUIST. 
Prelinguistic  Babblings. 

No  part  of  the  life  of  a  child  appeals  to  us  more  powerfully 
perhaps  than  the  first  use  of  our  language.  The  small 
person's  first  efforts  in  linguistics  win  us  by  a  certain 
graciousness,  by  the  friendly  impulse  they  disclose  to  get 
mentally  near  us,  to  enter  into  the  full  fruition  of  human 
intercourse.  The  difficulties,  too,  which  we  manage  to  lay 
upon  the  young  learner  of  our  tongue,  and  the  way  in 
which  he  grapples  with  these,  lend  a  peculiar  interest,  half 
pathetic,  half  humorous,  to  this  field  of  infantile  activity. 
To  the  scientific  observer  of  infancy,  moreover,  the  noting 
•of  the  stages  in  the  acquisition  of  speech  is  of  the  first 
importance.  Language  is  sound  moulded  into  definite 
forms  and  so  made  vehicular  of  ideas  ;  and  we  may  best 
watch  the  unfoldings  of  childish  thought  by  attending  to 
the  way  in  which  the  word-sculptor  takes  the  plastic  sound- 
material  and  works  it  into  its  picturesque  variety  of  shapes. 
A  special  biological  and  anthropological  interest  attaches 
to  the  child's  first  essays  in  the  use  of  words.  Language 
is  that  which  most  obviously  marks  off  human  from  animal 
intelligence.  One  of  the  most  interesting  problems  in  the 
science  of  man's  origin  and  early  development  is  how  he 
first  acquired  the  power  of  using  language-signs.  If  we 
proceed  on  the  biological  principle  that  the  development 
of  the  individual  represents  in  its  main  stages  that  of  the 
race,  we  may  expect  to  find  through  the  study  of  children's 


134  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

use  of  language  hints  as  to  how  our  race  came  by  the  in- 
valuable endowment.  How  far  it  is  reasonable  to  expect 
from  a  study  of  nursery  linguistics  a  complete  explanation 
of  the  process  by  which  man  became  speechful,  homo 
articulans,  will  appear  later  on.  But  an  examination  of 
these  linguistics  ought  surely  to  be  of  some  suggestive 
value  here. 

While  there  is  this  peculiar  scientific  interest  in  the  first 
manifestations  of  the  speech-faculty  in  the  child,  they 
are  of  a  kind  to  lend  themselves  particularly  well  to  a 
methodic  and  exact  observation.  Articulate  sounds  are 
sensible  objects  having  well-defined  characters  which  may  be 
accurately  noted  and  described  where  the  requisite  fineness 
of  ear  and  quickness  of  perception  are  present.  The  diffi- 
culties are  no  doubt  great  here :  but  they  are  precisely  the 
difficulties  to  sharpen  the  appetite  of  the  true  naturalist. 
Hence  we  need  not  wonder  that  early  articulation  fills  a 
large  place  in  the  naturalist's  observation  of  infant  life. 
Preyer,  for  example,  devotes  one  of  the  three  sections  of 
his  well-known  monograph  to  this  subject,  and  gives  us  a 
careful  and  elaborate  account  of  the  progress  of  articulation 
and  of  speech  up  to  the  end  of  the  period  dealt  with  (first 
three  years). 

Since  these  studies  are  especially  concerned  with  the 
characteristics  of  the  child  after  language  has  been  acquired 
I  shall  not  enter  into  the  history  of  his  rudimentary  speech 
at  any  great  length.  At  the  same  time,  since  language  is 
a  realm  of  activity  in  which  the  child  betrays  valuable 
characteristics  long  after  the  third  year,  it  deserves  a  special 
study  in  this  volume. 

As  everybody  knows,  long  before  the  child  begins  to- 
speak  in  the  conventional  sense  he  produces  sounds.  These 
are  at  first  cries  and  wanting  in  the  definiteness  of  true 
articulate  sounds.  Such  cries  are  expressive,  that  is,  utter- 
ances of  changing  conditions  of  feeling,  pain  and  pleasure, 
and  are  also  instinctive,  springing  out  of  certain  congenital 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  135 

nervous  arrangements  by  which  feeling  acts  upon  the 
muscular  organs.  This  crying  gradually  differentiates  itself 
into  a  rich  variety  of  expressions  for  hunger,  cold,  pain, 
joy  and  so  forth,  of  which  it  is  safe  to  say  that  the  majority 
of  nurses  and  mothers  have  at  best  but  a  very  imperfect 
knowledge. 

These  cries  disclose  from  the  first  a  germ  of  articulate 
sound,  vis.,  according  to  Preyer  an  approach  to  the  vowel 
sounds  u  (oo)  and  a  (Engl.  a  in  '  made ').  This  articulate 
element  becomes  better  defined  and  more  varied  in  the 
later  cries,  and  serves  in  part  to  differentiate  them  one 
from  the  other.  Thus  a  difference  of  shade  in  the  a  (in 
'  ah '),  difficult  to  describe,  has  been  observed  to  mark  off 
the  cry  of  pleasure  and  of  pain.  Along  with  this  articu- 
late sounds  begin  to  appear  in  periods  of  happy  contentment 
under  the  form  of  infantile  babbling  or  'la-la-ing'.  Thus 
the  child  will  bring  out  a  string  of  a  and  other  vowel  sounds. 
In  this  baby-twittering  the  several  vowel  sounds  of  our 
tongue  become  better  distinguishable,and  are  strung  together 
in  queer  ways,  as  ai-d-an-d.  An  attempt  is  made  by  Preyer 
and  others  to  give  the  precise  order  of  the  appearance  of 
the  several  vowel  sounds.  It  is  hardly  to  be  expected  that 
observers  would  agree  upon  a  matter  so  difficult  to  seize 
and  to  describe  ;  and  this  is  what  we  find.1  After  allow- 
ing, however,  for  differences  in  the  reading  off,  it  seems 
probable  that  there  is  a  considerable  diversity  in  the  order 
of  development  in  the  case  of  different  children.  This 
applies  still  more  to  the  appearance  of  the  consonantal 
sounds  which  long  before  the  end  of  the  sixth  month 
become  combined  with  the  vowels  into  syllabic  sounds,  as 
pa,  ma,  mam,  and  so  forth.  Thus,  though  the  labials  b,pt 

1  See  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  Cap.  20 ;  cf.  the  account  given  by  De  la  Calle, 
Perez,  First  Three  Years,  p.  248.  Stanley  Hall  observes  that  the  first 
vocalisation  of  the  infant  could  hardly  be  classified  even  with 
the  help  of  Bell's  phonic  notation  or  with  a  phonograph  (Pedagogical 
Seminary,  i.,  p.  132). 


136  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

m,  seem  to  come  first  in  most  cases,  they  may  be  ac- 
companied, if  not  preceded,  by  others,  as  the  back  open 
sound  ch  (in  Scotch  '  loch '),  or  (according  to  Preyer 
and  others)  by  the  corresponding  voiced  sound,  the  hard 
g.  Similarly,  sounds  as  /  and  r,  which  commonly 
appear  late,  are  said  in  some  instances  to  occur  quite 
early.1  Attempts  have  been  made  to  show  that  the 
order  of  sounds  here  corresponds  with  that  of  advancing 
physiological  difificultyor  amount  of  muscular  effort  involved. 
Yet  apart  from  the  fact  just  touched  on,  that  the  order  is  not 
uniform,  it  is  very  questionable  whether  the  more  common 
order  obeys  any  such  simple  physiological  law. 

This  primordial  babbling  is  wonderfully  rich  and  varied. 
According  to  Preyer  it  contains  most,  if  not  all  the  sounds 
which  are  afterwards  used  in  speaking,  and  among  these 
some  which  cause  much  difficulty  later  on.  It  is  thus  a 
wondrous  contrivance  of  nature  by  which  the  child  is  made 
to  rehearse  months  beforehand  for  the  difficult  performances 
of  articulate  speech.  It  is  a  preliminary  trying  of  the 
vocal  instrument  throughout  the  whole  of  its  register. 

Though  nurses  are  apt  to  fancy  that  in  this  pretty 
babbling  the  infant  is  talking  to  itself  there  is  no  reason  to 
think  that  it  amounts  even  to  a  rudiment  of  true  speech. 
To  speak  is  to  use  a  sound  intentionally  as  the  sign  of  an 
idea.  The  babbling  baby  of  five  months  cannot  be  sup- 
posed to  be  connecting  all  these  stray  sounds  with  ideas,  if 
indeed  it  can  be  said*  to  have  as  yet  any  definite  ideas. 
The  only  signification  which  this  primitive  articulation  can 
have  is  emotional.  Undoubtedly,  as  we  have  seen,  it  grows 
out  of  expressive  cries.  Even  the  happy  bubblings  over  of 
vowel  sounds  as  the  child  lies  on  his  back  and  '  crows,'  may 
be  said  to  be  expressive  of  his  happiness  like  the  movements 
of  arms  and  legs  which  accompany  it.  Yet  it  would  be  an 
exaggeration  to  suppose  that  the  elaborate  phonation  is 

1  Preyer's  boy  first  used  consonants  in  the  combinations  tahu,gij, 
tiro  (u  =  the  French  eu),  op.  cit.,  p.  366 ;  cf.  Cap.  21. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  137 

merely  expressive,  that  all  the  manifold  and  subtle  changes 
of  sound  are  due  to  obscure  variations  of  feeling. 

The  true  explanation  seems  to  be  that  the  appearance 
of  this  infantile  babbling,  just  like  that  of  the  movements  of 
the  limbs  which  accompany  it,  is  the  result  of  changes  in 
the  nervous  system.  As  the  centres  of  vocalisation  get 
developed,  motor  impulses  begin  to  play  on  the  muscles  of 
throat,  larynx,  and,  later  on,  lips,  tongue,  etc.,  and  in  this 
way  a  larger  and  larger  variety  of  sound  and  sound- 
combination  is  produced.  Such  phonation  is  commonly 
described  as  impulsive.  It  is  instinctive,  that  is  to  say, 
unlearnt,  and  due  to  congenital  nervous  connexions;  and 
at  best  it  can  only  be  said  to  express  in  its  totality  a  mood 
or  relatively  permanent  state  of  feeling. 

As  this  impulsive  articulation  develops  it  becomes  com- 
plicated by  a  distinctly  intentional  element.  The  child 
hears  the  sounds  he  produces  and  falls  in  love  with  them. 
From  this  moment  he  begins  to  go  on  babbling  for  the 
pleasure  it  brings.  We  see  the  germ  of  such  a  pleasure- 
seeking  babbling  in  the  protracted  iterations  of  the  same 
sound.  The  first  reduplications  and  serial  iterations,  a-a, 
ma-ma,  etc.,  may  be  due  to  physiological  inertia,  the  mere 
tendency  to  move  along  any  track  that  happens  to  be  struck, 
the  very  same  tendency  which  makes  a  prosy  speaker  go 
on  repeating  himself.  At  the  same  time  there  is  without 
doubt  in  these  infantile  iterations  a  rudiment  of  self- 
imitation.  That  is  to  say,  the  child  having  produced  a 
sound,  as  na  or  am,  impulsively  proceeds  to  repeat  the  per- 
formance in  order  to  obtain  a  renewal  of  the  sound-effect. 
This  renewed  impulse  may  be  supposed  further  to  bring 
with  it  a  germ  of  the  pleasure  of  iteration  of  sound,  or 
assonance.  The  addition  of  a  simple  rhythmic  character 
to  the  series  of  sounds  is  a  further  indication  of  its  pleasure- 
seeking  character.  Indeed  we  have  in  this  infantile  '  la- 
la-ing'  more  a  rudiment  of  song  and  music  than  of  articulate 
speech.  The  rude  vocal  music  of  savages  consists  of  a 


138  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

similar  rhythmic  threading  of  meaningless  sounds  in  which 
as  in  this  infantile  song  changes  of  feeling  reflect  themselves. 
We  may  best  describe  this  infantile  babbling  then  as  voice- 
play  and  as  rude  spontaneous  singing,  the  utterance  of  a 
mood,  indulged  in  for  the  sake  of  its  own  delight,  and 
serving  by  a  happy  arrangement  of  nature  as  a  preliminary 
practice  in  the  production  of  articulate  or  linguistic  sounds. 

Transition  to  Articulate  Speech. 

Let  us  now  seek  to  understand  how  this  undesigned 
trying  of  the  articulate  instrument  passes  into  true  signifi- 
cant articulation,  how  this  speech-protoplasm  develops  into 
the  organism  that  we  call  language.  And  here  the  question 
at  once  arises :  Does  the  child  tend  to  utilise  the  sounds 
thus  acquired  as  signs  apart  from  the  influence  of  education, 
that  is  to  say,  of  the  articulate  sounds  produced  by  others 
and  impressed  as  signs  upon  his  attention  ?  The  question 
is  not  easy  to  answer  owing  to  the  early  development  of 
the  imitative  impulse  and  to  the  constant  and  all-pervading 
influence  of  education  in  the  nursery.  Yet  I  will  offer 
a  tentative  answer. 

That  a  child  when  he  has  reached  a  certain  stage  of  in- 
telligence would  be  able  to  make  use  of  signs  quite  apart 
from  example  and  education  is  what  one  might  expect. 
Any  one  who  has  noticed  how  a  young  cat,  completely 
isolated  from  the  influence  of  example,  will  spontaneously 
hit  on  the  gesture  of  touching  the  arm  of  a  person  sitting 
at  a  meal  by  way  of  asking  to  be  fed,  cannot  be  surprised 
that  children  should  prove  themselves  capable  of  inventing 
signs.  We  know,  too,  that  deaf-mutes  will,  self-prompted, 
develop  among  themselves  an  elaborate  system  of  gesture- 
signs,  and  further  express  their  feelings  and  desires  by 
sounds,  which  though  not  heard  by  themselves  may  be 
understood  by  others  and  so  serve  as  effective  signs  of 
their  needs  and  wishes.  The  normal  child,  too,  in  spite  of 


THE    LITTLE   LINGUIST.  139 

the  powerful  influences  which  go  to  make  him  adopt  as 
signs  the  articulate  sounds  employed  by  others,  shows  a 
germ  of  unprompted  and  original  sign-making.  The 
earliest  of  such  unlearnt  signs  are  simple  gesture-move- 
ments, such  as  stretching  out  the  arms  when  the  child 
desires  to  be  taken  by  the  nurse.1  Nobody  has  suggested 
that  these  are  learnt  by  imitation.  The  same  is  true  of 
other  familiar  gesture-movements,  which  appear  towards  the 
end  of  the  first  year  or  later,  as  pulling  your  dress  just  as  a 
dog  does,  when  the  child  wants  you  to  go  with  him,  touching 
the  chair  when  he  wants  you  to  sit  down,  or  (as  Darwin's 
child  did  when  just  over  a  year)  taking  a  bit  of  paper  and 
pointing  to  the  fire  by  way  of  signifying  his  wish  to  see  the 
paper  burnt.  The  gesture  of  pointing,  though  no  doubt 
commonly  aided  by  example,  is  probably  capable  of  being 
reached  instinctively  as  an  outgrowth  from  the  grasping 
movement. 

These  gesture-signs,  I  find,  play  a  larger  part  in  the 
case  of  children  who  are  backward  in  talking,  and  so  are 
nearer  the  condition  of  the  deaf-mute.  Thus  a  lady  in 
sending  me  notes  on  her  three  children  remarks  that  the 
one  who  was  particularly  backward  in  his  speech  made  a 
free  use  of  gesture-signs.  When  sixteen  months  old  he 
had  certain  general  signs  of  this  sort,  using  a  sniff  as  a  sign 
of  flower,  and  a  mimic  kiss  as  a  sign  of  living  things,  i.e., 
all  sorts  of  animals.2 

Just  as  movements  may  thus  be  used  instinctively,  that 
is,  without  aid  from  others'  example,  both  as  expressing 
simple  feelings  and  desires,  and  also,  as  in  the  case  just 
mentioned,  as  indicating  ideas,  so  spontaneously  formed 

1  The  nature  of  gesture,  its  relation  to  language  proper,  and  its 
prevalence  in  infancy,  among  imbecile  children,  deaf-mutes,  etc.,  are 
discussed  by  Romanes,  Mental  Evolution  in  Man,  chap.  vi. 

2  A  charming  example  of  pantomimic  gesture  on  the  part  of  a 
little  girl  in  describing  to  her  father  her  first  bath  in  the  sea  is  given 
by  Romanes,  op.,  cit.,  p.  220. 


140  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

sounds  may  be  used  as  signs.  As  pointed  out  above  the 
first  self-prompted  articulation  is  closely  connected  with 
feeling,  and  we  find  that  in  the  second  half-year  when  the 
preliminary  practice  has  been  gone  through  certain  sounds 
take  on  a  distinctly  expressive  function.  Thus  one  little 
boy  when  eight  months  old  habitually  used  the  sound  '  ma- 
ma '  when  miserable,  and  '  da-da  '  when  pleased.  Among 
these  instinctive  expressive  sounds  one  of  the  most  import- 
ant is  that  indicative  of  hunger.  I  find  again  and  again 
that  a  special  sound  is  marked  off  as  a  mode  of  expression 
or  sign  of  this  craving.  This  fact  will  be  referred  to  again 
presently. 

True  language-sounds  significant  of  things  grow  out  of 
this  spontaneous  expressive  articulation.  Thus  the  demon- 
strative sign  da  which  accompanies  the  pointing,  and  which 
seems  to  be  frequently  used  with  slight  modifications  by 
German  as  well  as  by  English  children,  is  probably  in  its 
inception  merely  an  interjectional  expression  of  the  faint 
shock  of  wonder  produced  by  the  appearance  in  the  visual 
field  of  a  new  object.  But  used  as  a  concomitant  of  the 
pointing  gesture  it  takes  on  a  demonstrative  or  indicative 
function,  announcing  the  presence  or  arrival  of  an  object  in 
a  particular  locality  or  direction.  A  somewhat  similar  case 
is  that  of  '  ata  '  or  '  tata,'  a  sign  used  to  denote  the  depar- 
ture or  disappearance  of  an  object.  These  signs  are,  as 
Preyer  shows,  spontaneous  and  not  imitative  (e.g.,  of 
'there1  (da),  'all  gone').  This  is  confirmed  by  the  fact 
that  they  vary  greatly.  Thus  Preyer's  boy  used  for 
"  there  "  '  da,'  '  nda,'  '  nta,'  etc.,  and  for  "  all  gone  "  '  atta,' 
'  f-tu,'  'tuff,'  etc.  Again,  Tiedemann's  boy  used  the 
sound  'ah-ah,'  and  one  of  Stanley  Hall's  children 
the  sound  '  eh,'  when  pointing  to  an  object.  We  may 
conclude  then  that  there  are  spontaneous  vocal  reactions 
expressive  of  the  contrasting  mental  states  answering  to  the 
appearance  or  arrival  and  the  disappearance  or  departure 
of  an  impressive  and  interesting  object,  and  that,  further, 


THE    LITTLE   LINGUIST.  14! 

these  reactions  when  recognised  by  others  tend  to  become 
fixed  as  linguistic  signs.1 

Just  as  in  the  case  of  the  gesture-movements,  sniffing, 
kissing,  so  in  that  of  expressive  vocal  sounds  we  may  see 
a  tendency  to  take  on  the  function  of  true  signs  of  ideas. 
One  of  the  best  illustrations  of  this  is  to  be  found  in  the 
invention  of  a  word-sound  for  things  to  eat.  I  have  pointed 
out  that  the  state  of  hunger  with  its  characteristic  misery 
becomes  at  an  early  stage  marked  off  by  a  distinctive  ex- 
pressive sign.  At  a  later  stage  this  or  some  other  sound 
comes  to  be  used  intelligently  as  a  means  of  asking  for  food. 
Darwin's  boy  employed  the  sound  mum  in  this  way;  another 
English  child  used  'numby,'  and  yet  another  'nini' ;  a  French 
child  observed  by  M.  Taine  made  use  of  '  ham  '.  The  pre- 
dominance of  the  labial  m  shows  the  early  formation  of 
these  quasi-linguistic  signs,  and  suggests  that  they  were 
developed  out  of  the  primary  instinctive  'm'  sound.2  Such 
sounds,  coming  to  be  understood  by  the  nurse,  tend  to 
become  fixed  as  modes  of  asking  for  food. 

It  seems  but  a  step  from  the  demand  'Give  me  food'  to 
the  pointing  out  or  naming  of  things  as  food.  And  so  good 
an  observer  as  Darwin  says  that  his  boy  used  the  sound 
'  mum '  not  only  for  conveying  the  demand  or  command 
'  Give  me  food,'  but  also  as  a  substantive  '  food '  of  wide 
application.  He  later  went  on  to  erect  a  rudimentary 
classification  on  the  basis  of  this  substantive,  calling  sugar 
'shu-mum'  and  even  breaking  up  this  subdivision  by  calling 
liquorice  "black  shu-mum".3  This  however  seems,  so  far  as 
I  can  ascertain,  to  be  exceptional.  In  most  vocabularies  of 
children  of  two  or  three  no  generic  term  for  food  is  found, 

1  See  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  pp.  353,  390,  391. 

2  See  the  quotation  from  Lieber,  in  Taine's  On  Intelligence,  part  ii.» 
book  iv.,  chap.  i.      The  sign  for  'I  want  to  eat'  is  in  some  cases 
formed    by   a   generalising   process    out    of    a   sound    supplied    by 
another,  as  the  name  of  a  particular  edible.     See  the  example  given 
by  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  p.  362. 

3  See  Mind,  vol.  ii.,  p.  293. 


142  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

though  names  for  particular  kinds  of  food,  e.g.,  milk,  bread, 
are  in  use.  This  agrees  with  the  general  order  of  develop- 
ment of  thought-signs,  the  names  of  easily  distinguished 
species  appearing  in  the  case  of  the  individual  as  in  that 
of  the  race  before  those  of  comprehensive  and  '  abstract ' 
genera  such  as  '  food  '.  It  is  probable,  therefore,  that  these 
early  signs  for  food  are  but  imperfectly  developed  into  true 
thought-symbols  or  names.  They  retain  much  of  their 
primordial  character  as  expressions  of  desire  and  possibly 
of  the  volitional  state  answering  to  a  command.  This  is 
borne  out  by  the  fact  that  the  child  spoken  of  by  Taine 
used  the  sound  'tern'  as  a  sort  of  general  imperative  for 
*  give  ! '  '  take  ! '  '  look  ! '  etc.1 

Another  early  example  of  an  emotional  expression 
passing  into  a  germinal  sign  is  that  called  forth  at  the  sight 
of  moving  creatures.  This  acts  as  a  strong  stimulus  to  the 
baby  brain,  and  vigorous  muscular  reactions,  vocal  and 
other,  are  wont  to  appear.  One  little  boy  of  twelve  and 
three-quarter  months  usually  expressed  his  excitement  by  the 
sound  "  Do-boo-boo,"  which  was  used  regularly  for  about 
ten  days  on  the  appearance  of  a  dog,  a  horse,  a  bird,  and 
so  forth.  Here  we  have  a  protoplasmic  condition  of  the 
lingual  organism  which  we  call  a  name,  a  condition  destined 
never  to  pass  into  another  and  higher.  Sometimes,  how- 
ever, these  explosives  at  the  sight  of  animal  life  grow  into 
comparatively  fixed  signs  of  recognition. 

In  this  spontaneous  invention  of  quasi-linguistic  sounds 
imitation  plays  a  considerable  part.  It  is  evident,  indeed, 
that  gestures  are  largely  imitative.  Thus  the  sniff  and  the 
mimic  kiss  referred  to  just  now  are  plainly  imitations  of 
movements.  The  pointing  gesture,  too,  may  be  said  to  be 
a  kind  of  imitation  of  the  reaching  and  appropriating  move- 
ment of  the  arm.  The  sound  'do-boo-boo '  used  on  seeing 
an  animal  was  probably  imitative.  According  to  Preyer 
the  sounds  called  forth  by  the  sight  of  moving  objects, 

1  See  Mind,  vol.  ii.,  p.  255. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  143 

£.g.,  rolling  balls  and  wheels,  are  imitative.1  Whether  the 
signs  of  hunger,  'mum,'  'numby,'  are  due  to  modifications  of 
the  movements  carried  out  in  sucking,  seems  to  be  more 
problematic.'2 

In  certain  cases  imitation  is  the  one  sufficient  source  of 
the  sound.  In  what  are  called  onomatopoetic  sounds  the 
child  seeks  to  mimic  some  natural  sound,  and  such  imitation 
is  capable  of  becoming  a  fruitful  source  of  original  linguistic 
invention.  A  boy  between  nine  and  ten  months  imitated 
the  sound  of  young  roosters  by  drawing  in  his  breath,  and 
this  noise  became  for  a  time  a  kind  of  name  for  any 
feathered  creature,  including  small  birds.  More  commonly 
such  onomatopoetic  sounds  come  to  be  distinctive  recogni- 
tion-signs of  particular  classes  of  animals,  such  as '  oua-oua  ' 
or  '  bow-wow  '  for  the  dog,  '  moo-moo  '  for  the  cow,  '  ouack- 
ouack  '  or  '  kuack  '  for  the  duck,  and  so  forth. 

It  may,  of  course,  be  said  that  these  mimic  sounds  are 
in  part  learnt  from  the  traditional  vocabulary  of  the  nursery, 
in  which  the  nurse  takes  good  care  to  instruct  the  child. 
But  it  is  to  be  remembered  that  the  traditional  nursery 
language  itself  is  largely  an  adoption  of  children's  own 
sounds.  There  is,  moreover,  ample  independent  evidence 
to  show  that  children  are  zealous  and  indefatigable  imitators 
of  the  sounds  they  hear  as  of  the  movements  they  see. 
Towards  the  end  of  the  first  six  months  and  during  the 
second  half-year  a  child  is  apt  to  imitate  eagerly  any  sound 
you  choose  to  produce  before  him.  In  the  case  of  Preyer's 
boy  this  impulse  to  repeat  the  sounds  he  heard  developed 
into  a  kind  of  echoing  mania.  The  acquisition  of  others' 
language  plainly  depends  on  the  existence  and  the  vigour 
of  this  mimetic  impulse.  And  this  same  impulse  leads  the 
child  beyond  the  servile  adoption  of  our  conventional 

1  Op.  «/.,  p.  358. 

-  A  fact  that  appears  to  tell  against  imitation  here  is  that  one 
little  boy  of  seventeen  months  used  the  sound  '  did'n  '  for  anything 
to  eat. 


144  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

sounds  to  the  invention  of  new  or  onomatopoetic  sounds. 
Thus  one  little  child  discovered  the  pretty  sound  '  tin-tin  * 
as  a  name  for  the  bell.  Another  child,  a  girl,  quite  un- 
prompted, used  a  chirping  sound  for  a  bird,  and  a  curious 
clicking  noise  on  seeing  the  picture  of  a  horse  (no  doubt  in 
imitation  of  the  sound  of  a  horse's  hoofs) ;  while  a  little  boy 
used  a  faint  whistle  to  indicate  a  bird,  and  the  sound  'click- 
click'  to  denote  a  horse.  In  some  cases  a  grown-up  person's 
imitation  of  a  sound  is  imitated.  Thus  a  child  of  about 
two  used  the  sound  '  afta '  as  a  name  for  drinking,  and  also 
for  drinking-vessel,  "  in  imitation  of  the  sound  of  sucking  in 
air  which  the  nurse  used  to  make  when  pretending  to  drink  ".l 
In  these  two  sources  of  original  child-language,  ex- 
pression of  states  of  feeling,  desire,  etc.,  and  imitation,  we 
have  the  two  commonly  assigned  origins  of  human 
language.  Into  the  difficult  question  how  man  first  came 
to  the  use  of  language-sounds  I  do  not  propose  to  enter 
here.  Whatever  view  may  be  taken  with  respect  to  the 
first  beginnings  of  human  speech,  there  seems  little  doubt 
that  both  expressive  cries  and  imitations  of  natural  sounds 
have  had  their  place.  To  this  extent,  then,  we  may  say 
that  there  is  a  parallelism  between  the  early  evolution  of 
language  in  the  case  of  the  individual  and  in  that  of  the 
race.  Not  only  so,  it  may  be  said  that  our  study  of  these 
tentatives  of  the  child  in  language- formation  tends  to 
confirm  the  conclusions  of  philology  and  anthropology  that 
the  current  of  human  speech  did  probably  originate,  in 
main  part  at  least,  by  way  of  these  two  tributaries.2 

1  Quoted  by  Romanes,  Mental  Evolution  in  Man,  p.  143. 

2  The  concerted  cries  during  co-operative  work  to  which  Noiree 
ascribes  the  origin  of  language-sounds  would  seem,  while  having  a 
special  physiological   cause  as  concomitant  and  probably  auxiliary 
motor  processes,  to  be  analogous  at  least  to  emotional  cries,  in  so  far 
as  they  spring  out  of  a  peculiar  condition  of  feeling,  that  of  effort. 
On  the  other  hand,  as  concerted  they  came  under  the  head  of  imitative 
movements.     So  far  as  I  can  learn  the  nursery  supplies  no  analogies 
to  these  utterances. 


THE    LITTLE   LINGUIST.  145 

While  vocal  sounds  which  are  clearly  traceable  to 
emotional  expressions  or  to  imitations  form  the  staple  of 
the  normal  child's  inventions  they  do  not  exhaust  them. 
Some  of  these  early  self-prompted  linguistic  sounds  cannot 
be  readily  explained.  I  find,  for  example,  that  children 
are  apt  to  invent  names  for  their  nurses  and  sometimes  for 
themselves  which,  so  far  as  I  can  ascertain,  bear  no  dis- 
coverable resemblance  to  the  sounds  used  by  others.  Thus 
the  same  little  girl  that  invented  '  numby '  for  food  and 
'  afta '  for  drinking  called  her  nurse  '  Lee '  though  no  one 
else  called  her  by  any  other  name  than  '  nurse '.  It  is 
difficult  to  suppose  that  the  child  was  transforming  the  sound 
'  nurse  '  in  this  case.  Preyer's  boy  called  his  nurse,  whom 
others  addressed  as  Marie,  '  Wola,'  which  Preyer  explains 
rather  forcedly  as  deriving  by  inversion  from  the  fre- 
quently heard  '  Ja  wohl ! '  A  lady  friend  informs  me  that 
her  little  boy  when  thirteen  months  old  called  himself 
'  Bla-a,'  though  he  was  always  addressed  by  others  as 
Jeffrey,  and  that  he  stuck  to  '  Bla-a '  for  six  months.1  A 
germ  of  imitation  is  doubtless  recognisable  here  in  the 
preservation  of  the  syllabic  form  or  structure  (that  of  mono- 
syllable or  dissyllable).  Yet  the  amount  of  transformation 
is,  to  say  the  least,  surprising  in  children,  who  show  them- 
selves capable  of  fairly  close  imitation.  Possibly  a  child's 
ear  notes  analogies  of  sound  which  escape  our  more  so- 
phisticated organ.  However  this  be,  the  fact  of  such  origin- 
ation of  names  (other  than  those  clearly  onomatopoetic)  is 
noteworthy. 

Lastly  a  reference  may  be  made  to  the  fact  that  children 
have  shown  themselves  capable  of  inventing  the  rudiments 
of  a  simple  kind  of  language.  Professor  Horatio  Hale  of 
America  has  made  a  special  study  of  these  spontaneous 
child-languages.  One  case  is  that  of  twin  American  boys 

1  His  brother  when  one  year  old  called  his  nurse,  whose  real 
name  was  Maud,  Bur,  which  was  probably  a  rough  rendering  of 
'  nurse '. 

10 


146  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

who  when  the  talking  age  came  employed  riot  the  English 
sounds  that  they  heard  others  speak  but  a  language  of  their 
own.  Another,  and  in  some  ways  more  remarkable  case, 
is  that  of  a  little  girl  who  at  the  age  of  two  was  backward 
in  speaking,  only  using  the  names  '  papa '  and  '  mamma," 
and  who,  nevertheless,  at  that  age,  and  in  the  first  instance 
without  any  stimulus  or  aid  from  a  companion,  proceeded 
to  invent  a  vocabulary  and  even  simple  sentence-forms  of 
her  own,  which  she  subsequently  prevailed  on  an  elder 
brother  to  use  with  her.  The  vocables  struck  out,  though 
suggesting  some  slight  aural  acquaintance  with  French — 
which,  however,  was  never  spoken  in  her  home — are  appar- 
ently quite  arbitrary  and  not  susceptible  of  explanation  by 
imitation.1 

I  think  the  facts  here  brought  together  testify  to  the 
originality  of  the  child  in  the  field  of  linguistics.  It  may 
be  said  that  in  none  of  these  cases  is  the  effect  of  education 
wholly  absent.  A  child,  as  we  all  know,  is  taught  the 
names  of  objects  and  actions  long  before  he  can  articulate. 
Thus  Darwin's  boy  knew  the  name  of  his  nurse  five  months 
before  he  invented  the  vocable  '  mum '.  It  is  obvious 
indeed  that  wherever  children  are  subjected  to  normal 
training  their  sign-making  impulse  is  stimulated  by  the 
example  of  others.  At  the  same  time  the  facts  here  given 
show  that  the  working  of  this  impulse  may,  in  a  certain 
number  of  children  at  least,  strike  out  original  lines  of  its 
own  independently  of  the  direct  action  of  example  and 
education.  What  is  wanted  now  is  to  experiment  care- 
fully with  an  intelligent  child,  encouraging  him  to  make 
signs  by  patient  attention  and  ready  understanding,  but 
at  the  same  time  carefully  abstaining  from  giving  the  lead 
or  even  taking  up  and  adopting  the  first  utterances  so  as  to 
bring  in  the  influence  of  imitation.  I  think  there  is  little 
doubt  that  a  child  so  situated  might  develop  the  rudiments 

1  For  a  summary  of  Professor  Hale's  researches  see  Romanes, 
Mental  Evolution  in  .Man,  p.  138  ff. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  147 

of  a  vocal  language.  The  experiment  would  be  difficult  to 
carry  out,  as  it  would  mean  the  depriving  of  the  child  for  a 
time  of  the  advantages  of  education.1 

Beginnings  of  Linguistic  Imitation. 

The  learning  of  the  mother-tongue  is  one  of  the  most 
instructive  and,  one  may  add,  the  most  entertaining  chapters 
in  the  history  of  the  child's  education.  The  brave  efforts 
to  understand  and  follow,  the  characteristic  and  quaint 
•errors  that  often  result,  the  frequent  outbursts  of  originality 
in  bold  attempts  to  enrich  our  vocabulary  and  our  linguistic 
forms — all  this  will  repay  the  most  serious  study,  while  it 
will  provide  ample  amusement. 

As  pointed  out  above  the  learning  of  the  mother- 
tongue  is  essentially  a  kind  of  imitation.  The  process 
is  roughly  as  follows.  The  child  hears  a  particular  sound 
used  by  another,  and  gradually  associates  it  with  the 
object,  the  occurrence,  the  situation,  along  with  which  it 
again  and  again  presents  itself.  When  this  stage  is  reached 
Tie  can  understand  the  word-sound  as  used  by  another 
though  he  cannot  as  yet  use  it.  Later,  by  a  considerable 
interval,  he  learns  to  connect  the  particular  sound  with  the 
appropriate  vocal  action  required  for  its  production.  As 
soon  as  this  connexion  is  formed  his  sign-making  impulse 
imitatively  appropriates  it  by  repeating  it  in  circumstances 
similar  to  those  in  which  he  has  heard  others  employ  it. 

The  imitation  of  others'  articulate  sounds  begins,  as 
already  remarked,  very  early  and  long  before  the  sign- 
making  impulse  appropriates  them  as  true  words.  The 

1  Of  course,  as  Max  Miiller  says  (The  Science  of  Language,  i.,  p. 
481  f.),  the  facts  ascertained  do  not  prove  that  'infants  left  to  them- 
selves would  invent  a  language '.  The  influence  of  example,  the 
appeal  to  the  imitative  impulse,  has  been  at  work  before  the  inven- 
tions appear.  Yet  they  do,  I  think,  show  that  they  have  the  sign- 
making  instinct,  and  might  develop  this  to  some  extent  even  were 
the  educative  influence  of  others'  language  removed. 


148  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

impulse  to  imitate  others'  movements  seems  first  to  come 
into  play  about  the  end  of  the  fourth  month  ;  and  traces 
of  imitative  movements  of  the  mouth  in  articulation  are 
said  to  have  been  observed  in  certain  cases  about  this  time. 
But  it  is  only  in  the  second  half-year  that  the  imitation  of 
sounds  becomes  clearly  marked.  At  first  this  imitation  is 
rather  of  tone,  rise  and  fall  of  voice,  and  apportioning  of 
stress  or  accent  than  of  articulate  quality  ;  but  gradually 
the  imitation  takes  on  a  more  definite  and  complete 
character.1 

Towards  the  end  of  the  year,  in  favourable  cases,  true 
linguistic  imitation  commences.  That  is  to  say,  word- 
sounds  gathered  from  others  are  used  as  such.  Thus,  a 
boy  of  ten  months  would  correctly  name  his  mother, 
'  Mamma,'  his  aunt,  '  Addy '  (Aunty),  and  a  person  called 
Maggie,  '  Azzie  '.2  As  already  suggested,  this  imitative 
reproduction  of  others'  words  synchronises,  roughly  at  least,, 
with  the  first  onomatopoetic  imitation  of  natural  sounds. 

Transformations  of  our  Words. 

As  is  well  known  the  first  tentatives  in  the  use  of  the 
common  speech-forms  are  very  rough.  The  child  in  re- 
producing transforms,  and  these  transformations  are  often 
curious  and  sufficiently  puzzling. 

The  most  obvious  thing  about  these  first  infantile 
renderings  of  the  adult's  language  is  that  they  are  a 
simplification.  This  applies  to  all  words  alike.  Mono- 
syllables if  involving  a  complex  mass  of  sound  are  usually 
reduced,  as  when  'dance'  is  shortened  to  'da'.  This 
clearly  illustrates  the  difficulty  of  certain  sound-combina- 
tions, a  point  to  be  touched  on  presently.  More  striking  is 
the  habitual  reduction  of  dissyllables  and  polysyllables. 

1  Preyer's   boy   gave    the    first    distinct    imitative    response   to 
articulate  sound  in  the  eleventh  month.      This  is,  so  far  as  I  can- 
ascertain,  behind  the  average  attainment. 

2  Tracy,  The  Psychology  of  Childhood,  p.  71. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  149 

Here  we  note  that  the  child  concentrates  his  effort  on  the 
reproduction  of  a  part  only  of  the  syllabic  series,  which 
part  he  may  of  course  give  but  very  imperfectly.  The 
shortening  tends  to  go  to  the  length  of  reducing  to  a 
monosyllable.  Thus  '  biscuit '  becomes  '  bik,'  '  Constance  ' 
'  tun,'  '  candle '  '  ka,'  '  bread  and  butter  '  '  bup '  or  '  bu  '. 
Polysyllables,  though  occasionally  cut  down  to  monosyll- 
ables, as  when  '  hippopotamus '  became  '  pots,'  are  more 
frequently  reduced  to  dissyllables,  as  when  '  periwinkle ' 
was  shortened  to  '  pinkie '.  Handkerchief  is  a  trying  word 
for  the  English  child,  and  for  obvious  reasons  has  to  be 
learnt.  It  was  reduced  by  the  eldest  child  of  a  family  to 
'  hankish,'  by  the  two  next  to  '  hamfisch '  and  by  the  last 
two  to  'hanky'.  The  little  girl  M.  also  reduced  the  last 
two  syllables  to  '  fish,'  making  the  sound  '  hanfish  '. 

There  seems  to  be  no  simple  law  governing  these  re- 
ductions of  verbal  masses.  The  accentuated  syllable,  by 
exciting  most  attention,  is  commonly  the  one  reproduced, 
as  when  'nasturtium'  became  'turtium  V  In  the  case  of 
long  words  the  position  of  a  syllable  at  the  beginning 
or  at  the  end  of  the  word  seems  to  give  an  advantage 
in  this  competition  of  sounds,  the  former  by  impressing 
the  sound  as  the  first  heard  (compare  the  way  in  which 
we  note  and  remember  the  initial  sound  of  a  name),2  the 
latter  by  impressing  it  as  the  last  heard,  and  therefore  best 
retained.  The  unequal  articulatory  facility  of  the  several 
sound-combinations  making  up  the  word  may  also  have  an 
influence  on  this  unconscious  selection.  I  think  it  not 
unlikely,  too,  that  germs  of  a  kind  of  aesthetic  preference 

1  In  the   reduction   of  'Constance'  to  'tun'  the  same  thing  is 
seen,  for  this  child  uniformly  turned  k's  into  f  s.     Cf.  Preyer,  op.  cit., 

P-  397- 

2  It  has  been  pointed  out  to  me  by  Dr.  Postgate  that  the  second- 
ary stress  on  the  first  syllable  of  English  words  over  four  syllables 
(and  some  four-syllabled  words)  may  assist  in  impressing  the  first 
syllable. 


150  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

for  certain  sounds  as  new,  striking  or  fine,  may  co-operate 
here.1 

Such  simplification  of  words  is  from  the  first  opposed, 
and  tends  in  time  to  be  counteracted,  by  the  growth  of  a 
feeling  for  their  general  form  as  determined  by  the  number 
of  syllables,  as  well  as  the  distribution  of  stress  and  any 
accompanying  alterations  of  tone  or  pitch.  The  infant's 
first  imitations  of  the  sounds  'good-bye,'  'all  gone,'  and 
so  forth,  by  couples  which  preserve  hardly  anything  of 
the  articulatory  character,  though  they  indicate  the 
syllabic  form,  position  of  stress,  and  rising  and  falling 
inflection,  illustrate  the  early  development  of  this  feeling. 
Hence  we  find  in  general  an  attempt  to  reproduce  the 
number  of  syllables,  and  also  to  give  the  proper  distribution 
of  stress.  Thus  '  biscuit '  becomes  '  bi'tchic,'  '  cellar '  '  si'too,' 
'umbrella'  'nobella,"  elephant'  'etteno,'  or  (by  a  German 
child)  'ewebon,'  'kangaroo'  '  kogglegoo,'  'hippopotamus' 
'  ippenpotany,'  and  so  forth.2 

As  suggested  above  there  goes  from  the  first  with  the 
cutting  down  of  the  syllabic  series  a  considerable  alteration 
of  the  single  constituent  sounds.  The  vowel  sounds  are 
rarely  omitted  ;  yet  they  may  be  greatly  modified,  and 
these  modifications  occur  regularly  enough  to  suggest  that 
the  child  finds  certain  nuances  of  vowel  sounds  compara- 
tively hard  to  reproduce.  Thus  the  short  d  in  hat,  and  the 
long  I  (ai),  seem  to  be  acquired  only  after  considerable 
practice.3  But  it  is  among  the  consonants  that  most 

1  Recent  psychological  experiments  show  that  similar  influences 
are  at  work  when  a  person  attempts  to  repeat  a  long  series  of  verbal 
sounds,  say  ten  or  twelve  nonsense  syllables.  Initial  or  final  position 
or  accent  may  favour  the  reproduction  of  a  member  of  such  a  series. 

-  Here  again  we  see  a  similarity  between  a  child's  repetition  of  a 
name  heard,  and  an  adult's  attempt  to  repeat  a  long  series  of  syllabic 
sounds.  In  the  latter  case  also  there  is  a  general  tendency  to  pre- 
serve the  length  and  rhythmic  form  of  the  whole  series. 

3  With  the  diphthong  or  glide  t  may  be  taken  oi,  which  was  first 
mastered  by  the  child  M.  at  the  age  of  two  years  three  months. 


THE    LITTLE   LINGUIST.  15 1 

trouble  arises.  Many  of  these,  as  the  sibilants  or  '  hisses/ 
s,  sh,  the  various  /  and  r  sounds,  the  dentals,  the  "  point- 
teeth-open  "  th  and  dh  (in  '  thin,'  '  this '),  the  back  or 
guttural  'stops,'  i.e.,  k  and  hard  g,  and  others  as  /or  soft^ 
(as  in  '  James,'  '  gem '),  appear,  often  at  least,  to  cause 
difficulty  at  the  beginning  of  the  speech  period.  With 
these  must  be  reckoned  such  combinations  as  st,  str. 

In  many  cases  the  difficult  sounds  are  merely  dropped. 
Thus  ;  poor'  may  become  'poo,'  'look'  '  ook,'  'Schulter' 
(German)  'Ulter'.  In  the  case  of  awkward  combinations 
this  dropping  is  apt  to  be  confined  to  the  difficult  sound, 
provided,  that  is  to  say,  the  other  is  manageable  alone. 
Thus  '  dance  '  becomes  '  dan,'  '  trocken  '  (German)  becomes 
'tokko '.  More  particularly  s  and  sh  are  apt  to  be  omitted 
before  other  consonants.  Thus  'stair'  becomes  '  tair,' 
'  sneeze  '  '  neeze,'  '  schneiden  '  (German)  '  neida,'  and  so 
forth. 

Along  with  such  lame  omissions  we  have  the  more 
vigorous  procedure  of  substitutions.  In  certain  cases  there 
seems  little  if  any  kinship  between  the  sounds  or  the 
articulatory  actions  by  which  they  are  produced.  At  the 
early  stage  more  particularly  almost  any  manageable  sound 
seems  to  do  duty  as  substitute.  The  early-acquired 
labials,  including  the  labio-dental/^  come  in  as  serviceable 
'  hacks '  at  this  stage.  What  we  call  lisping  is  indeed 
exemplified  in  this  class  of  infantile  substitutions.  Chil- 
dren have  been  observed  to  say  '  fank '  for  '  thank '  and 
'mouf  for  'mouth,'  'feepy'  for  'sleepy,'  'poofie'  for  'pussy/ 
'  wiver '  for  '  river,'  '  Bampe  '  for  '  Lampe '  (German).  The 
dentals,  too,  d  and  /,  are  turned  to  all  kinds  of  vicarious 
service.  Thus  we  find  'ribbon'  rendered  by  'dib,'  'gum' 
by  'dam,'  'Greete'  (German)  by  'Deete,'  'Gummi'  (German) 
by  'Dummi,'  'cut'  by  'tut,'  and  'klopfen"1  (German)  by  'top- 
fen  '.  Similarly  'gee-gee'  (horse),  which  oddly  enough  was 
first  rendered  by  the  child  M.  as  'dee-gee,'  is  altered  to  'dee- 
dee'.  I  find  too  that  new  sounds  are  apt  to  be  put  to  this 


152  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

miscellaneous  use.  Thus  one  child  after  learning  the  as- 
pirate (k)  at  two  years  not  only  brought  it  out  with  great 
emphasis  in  its  proper  place  but  began  to  use  it  as  a 
substitute  for  other  and  unmanageable  sounds.  Thus  he 
would  say,  '  hie  down  on  hofa '  for  '  lie  down  on  sofa '. 
The  aspirate  is  further  used  in  place  of  sh,  as  when  'shake' 
was  rendered  by  '  hate,'  and  of  st,  as  when  Preyer's  boy 
called  '  Stern  '  '  Hern  '.  In  other  cases  we  see  that  the  little 
linguist  is  trying  to  get  as  near  as  possible  to  the  sound, 
and  such  approximations  are  an  interesting  sign  of  pro- 
gress. Thus  in  one  case  '  chatterbox '  was  rendered  by 
'  jabberwock,'  in  another  case  '  dress  '  by  '  desh,'  in  another 
(Preyer's  boy),  'Tisch'  (German)  by  'Tiss  '.l 

Besides  omissions  and  substitution  of  sounds,  occasional 
insertions  are  said  to  occur.  According  to  one  set  of  obser- 
vations r  may  be  inserted  after  the  broad  a,  as  when 
*  pocket '  was  rendered  by  '  barket '.  A  cockney  is  apt  to 
do  the  same,  as  when  he  talks  of  having  a  '  barth  '  (bath). 
Yet  this  observation  requires  to  be  verified. 

These  alterations  of  articulate  sound  by  the  child  remind 
one  of  the  changes  which  the  languages  of  communities 
undergo.  We  know,  indeed,  that  these  changes  are  due  to 
imperfect  imitation  by  succeeding  generations  of  learners.2 
Hence  we  need  not  be  surprised  to  find  now  and  again 
analogies  between  these  nursery  transformations  and  those 
of  words  in  the  development  of  languages.  In  reproducing 
the  sounds  which  he  hears  a  child  often  illustrates  a  law  of 
adult  phonetic  change.  Thus  changes  within  the  same 
class  of  sounds,  as  the  frequent  alteration  of  '  this '  into 
'  dis,'  clearly  correspond  with  those  modifications  recognised 
in  Grimm's  Law.  So,  too,  the  common  substitution  of  a 
dental  for  a  guttural  has  its  parallel  in  the  changes  of  racial 

1 1  find  according  to  the  notes  sent  me  that  the  sounds  s  and  sh 
develop  unequally  in  the  cases  of  different  children.  Some  acquire 
s,  others  sh  before  the  other. 

•  See  Sweet,  History  of  English  Sounds,  p.  15. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  153 

language.1  Nobody  again  can  note  the  transformation  of 
n  into  m  before /in  the  form  '  hamfish  '  for  'handkerchief 
without  thinking  of  the  Greek  change  of  <rvv  into  crvp,  before 
/3,  and  like  changes.  Philologists  may  probably  find  many 
other  parallels.  One  of  them  tells  me  that  his  little  girl,  on 
rendering  sh  by  the  guttural  /i,  reproduced  a  change  in 
Spanish  pronunciation.  M.  Egger  compares  a  child's 
rendering  of  '  /rop  '  (French)  by  '  crop '  with  the  transfor- 
mation of  the  Latin  '  /remere  '  into  '  <rraindre '. 

I  have  assumed  here  that  children's  defective  reproduc- 
tion of  our  verbal  sounds  is  the  result  of  inability  to  produce 
certain  sounds  and  not  due  to  the  want  of  a  discrimination  of 
the  sounds  by  the  ear.  This  may  seem  strange  in  the  light 
of  Preyer's  statement  that  the  earlier  impulsive  babbling  in- 
cludes most,  if  not  all,  of  the  sounds  required  later  on  for 
articulation.  This  may  turn  out  to  be  an  exaggeration,  yet 
there  is  no  doubt,  I  think,  that  certain  sounds,  including 
some  as  the  initial  /  which  are  common  in  the  earlier 
babbling  stage,  are  not  produced  at  the  beginning  of  the 
articulatory  period.  As  the  avoidance  of  these  occurs  in  all 
children  alike  it  seems  reasonable  to  infer  that  they  involve 
difficult  muscular  combinations  in  the  articulatory  organ. 
At  the  same  time  it  seems  going  too  far  to  say,  as  Schultze 
does,  that  the  order  of  acquisition  of  sounds  corresponds 
with  the  degree  of  difficulty.  The  very  variability  of  this 
order  in  the  case  of  different  children  shows  that  there  is 
no  such  simple  correspondence  as  this.2 

The  explanation  of  those  early  omissions  and  alterations 
is  probably  a  rather  complex  matter.  To  begin  with,  the 
speech-organs  of  a  child  may  lose  special  aptitudes  by  the 
development  of  other  and  opposed  aptitudes.  A  friend  of 
mine,  a  physiologist,  tells  me  that  his  little  boy  who  said 
'  ma-ma '  (but  not  '  da-da ')  at  ten  months  lost  at  the  age  of 

1  See  Sievers,  Phonetik,  p.  230. 

2  Cf.  Pollock,  Mind,  vi.,  p.  436,  and  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  p.  434. 


154  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

nineteen  months  the  use  of  m,  for  which  he  regularly  substi- 
tuted b.  He  suggests  that  the  nasal  sound  m,  though  easy 
for  a  child  in  the  sucking  stage  and  accustomed  to  close  the 
lips,  may  become  difficult  later  on  through  the  acquisition  of 
open  sounds.  It  is  worth  considering  whether  this  principle 
does  not  apply  to  other  inabilities.  This,  however,  is  a 
question  for  the  science  of  phonetics. 

We  must  remember,  further,  that  it  is  one  thing  to 
carry  out  an  articulatory  movement  as  a  child  of  nine 
months  carries  it  out,  'impulsively,'  through  some  congeni- 
tally  arranged  mode  of  exciting  the  proper  motor  centre, 
another  thing  to  carry  it  out  volitionally,  i.e.,  in  order  to 
produce  a  desired  result.  This  last  means  that  the  sound- 
effect  of  the  movement  has  been  learned,  that  the  image  or 
representation  of  it  has  been  brought  into  definite  connexion 
with  a  particular  impulse,  vis.,  that  of  carrying  out  the 
required  movement :  and  this  is  now  known  to  depend  on 
the  formation  of  some  definite  neural  connexion  between 
the  auditory  and  the  motor  regions  of  the  speech-centre. 
This  process  is  clearly  more  complex  than  the  first  instinc- 
tive utterance,  and  may  be  furthered  or  hindered  by  various 
conditions.  Thus  a  child's  own  spontaneous  babblings 
may  not  have  sufficed  to  impress  a  particular  sound  on  the 
memory ;  in  which  case  his  acquisition  of  it  will  be  favoured 
or  otherwise  by  the  frequency  with  which  it  is  produced  by 
others  in  his  hearing.  It  is  probable  that  differences  in  the 
range  and  accuracy  of  production  of  sounds  by  nurse  and 
mother  tell  from  the  first.  The  differences  observable  in 
the  order  of  acquisition  of  sounds  among  children  may  be 
in  part  due  to  this,  and  not  merely  to  differences  in  the 
speech-organ.  It  is  probable,  too,  that  children's  attention 
may  be  especially  called  to  certain  sounds  or  sound-groups, 
either  because  of  a  preferential  liking  for  the  sounds  them- 
selves, or  because  of  a  special  need  of  them  as  useful  names. 
M.'s  mother  assures  me  that  the  child  seemed  to  dislike 
particular  sounds  as  J,  which  she  could  and  did  occasion- 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  155 

ally  pronounce,  though  she  was  given  to  altering  them.1 
Another  lady  writes  that  her  boy  at  the  age  of  twenty-two 
months  surprised  her  by  suddenly  bringing  out  the  com- 
bination '  scissors  '.  He  had  just  begun  to  use  scissors  in 
cutting  up  paper,  and  so  had  acquired  a  practical  interest 
in  this  sound-mass. 

We  may  now  pass  to  another  of  the  commonly  recognised 
defects  of  early  articulation,  viz.,  the  transposition  of  sounds 
or  metathesis.  Sometimes  it  is  two  contiguous  sounds 
which  are  transposed,  as  when  'star'  is  rendered  by  'tsar' 
and  '  spoon  '  by  '  psoon  '.  Here  the  motive  of  the  change  is 
evidently  to  facilitate  the  combination.  We  have  a  parallel 
to  this  in  the  use  of  '  aks '  (ax)  for  '  ask,'  a  transposition 
'  which  was  not  long  since  common  enough  in  the  West  of 
England.2  In  other  transpositions  sounds  are  shifted 
further  from  their  place.  Preyer  quotes  a  case  in  which 
there  was  a  dislocation  of  vowel  sounds,  viz.,  in  the  trans- 
formation of  '  bite '  (German)  into  '  beti  '.3  Here  there 
seems  to  be  no  question  of  avoiding  a  difficult  combination. 
Other  examples  are  the  following  :  '  hoogshur  '  for  '  sugar  ' 
(one  of  the  first  noticed  at  the  age  of  two) ;  '  mungar'  for 
'grandmamma,'  'punga'  for  'grandpapa,'  and  '  natis '  for 
'nasty'  (boy  between  eighteen  and  twenty-four  months) ;  and 
'  boofitul '  for  '  beautiful '.  Here  again  we  have  an  analogy 
to  defective  speech  in  adults.  When  a  man  is  very  tired 
he  is  liable  to  precisely  similar  inversions  of  order.  The 
explanation  seems  to  be  that  the  right  group  of  sounds  may 
present  itself  to  the  speaker's  consciousness  without  any 
clear  apprehension  of  their  temporal  order.  Perhaps  quasi- 
aesthetic  preferences  play  a  part  here  too.  The  child  M. 

1  The  same  child,  capriciousl}'  as  it  might  look,  would  sometimes 
avoid  y,  as  in  saying  '  esh  '  for  '  yes,'  though  she  regularly  used  this 
sound  as  a  substitute  for  /,  saying  'yook '  for  '  look,'  and  so  on. 

-  See  Sweet,  History  of  English  Sounds,  p.  33 ;  cf.  also  the  change 
of 'frith'  to  'firth'. 

3  Op.  cit.,  p.  397. 


156  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

seems  to  have  preferred  the  sequence  m-n  to  n-m,  saying 
'  jaymen  '  for  '  geranium,  '  burman  '  for  '  laburnum  '. 

Another  interesting  feature  in  this  early  articulation  is 
the  impulse  to  double  sounds,  to  get  a  kind  of  effect  of 
assonance  or  of  rhyme  by  a  repetition  of  sound  or  sound - 
group.  The  first  and  simplest  form  of  this  is  where  a  whole 
sound-mass  or  syllable  is  iterated,  as  in  the  familiar  '  ba-ba,' 
'  gee~gee '  '  ni-ni '  (for  nice).  Some  children  frequently  turn 
monosyllables  into  reduplications,  making  book  '  boom- 
boom  '  and  so  forth.  It  is,  however,  in  attempting  dis- 
syllables that  the  reduplication  is  most  common.  Thus 
'naughty'  becomes  'na-na,'  'faster'  'fa-fa,'  'Julia'  'dum-dum,' 
and  so  forth,  where  the  repeated  syllable  displaces  the 
second  original  syllable  and  so  serves  to  retain  something 
of  the  original  word-form.  In  some  cases  the  second  and 
unaccented  syllable  is  selected  for  reduplication,  as  in  the 
instance  quoted  by  Perez,  '  peau-peau '  for  '  chapeau '. 
Such  reduplications  are  sometimes  aided  by  kinship  of 
sound,  as  when  the  little  girl  M.  changed  '  purple '  into  its 
primitive  form  '  purpur  '. 

These  early  reduplications  are  clearly  a  continuation  of 
the  repetitions  observable  in  the  earlier  babbling,  and  grow 
out  of  the  same  motive,  the  impulse  to  go  on  doing  a  thing, 
and  the  pleasure  of  repetition  and  self-imitation.  As  is 
well  known,  these  reduplications  have  their  parallel  in  many 
of  the  names  used  by  savage  tribes.1 

In  addition  to  these  palpable  reduplications  of  sound- 
masses  we  have  repetitions  of  single  sounds,  the  repeated 
sound  being  substituted  for  another  and  foreign  one.  This 
answers  to  what  is  called  in  phonetics  'assimilations'.2 
In  the  majority  of  cases  the  assimilation  is  'progressive,' 
the  change  being  carried  out  by  a  preceding  on  a 

1  See  Tylor,  Primitive  Culture,  i.,  198.  On  the  taking  up  of  baby 
reduplications  into  language  see  the  same  work,  i.,  204.  Cf.  the  same 
writer's  Anthropology,  p.  129. 

-  See  above,  p.  137 ;  cf.  Sievers,  Phonetik,  p.  236. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  157 

succeeding  sound.  Examples  are  '  Kikie '  for  'Kitty,' 
and  ' purpur '  for  'purple'.  This  last  transformation, 
though  it  was  made  by  the  little  daughter  of  a  distinguished 
philologist,  was  quite  innocent  of  classical  influence,  and 
was  clearly  motived  by  the  childish  love  of  reduplication 
of  sound.  In  many  cases  the  substitution  of  an  easy  for  a 
difficult  sound  seems  to  be  determined  in  part  by  assimila- 
tion, as  when  'another'  was  rendered  by  '  annunner,' 
'  gateau  '  (French)  by  '  ca-co '.  The  assimilation  seems,  too, 
sometimes  to  work  "  regressively,"  as  when  '  thick '  be- 
comes 'kick,'  'Bonnie  Dundee'  'Bun-dun,'  and  '  tortue ' 
(French)  '  tu-tu,'  in  which  two  last  reduplication  is 
secured  approximately  or  completely  by  change  of  vowel.1 
There  seem  also  to  be  cases  of  what  may  be  called 
partial  assimilation,  that  is,  a  tendency  to  transform  a 
sound  into  one  of  the  same  class  as  the  first.  "If  (writes 
a  mother  of  her  boy)  a  word  began  with  a  labial  he 
generally  concluded  it  with  a  labial,  making  '  bird,'  for 
example,  'bom'."  But  these  cases  are  not,  perhaps,  per- 
fectly clear  examples  of  assimilation. 

Along  with  the  tendency  to  reduplicate  syllabic  masses, 
we  see  a  disposition  to  use  habitually  certain  favourite 
syllables  as  terminations,  more  particularly  the  pet  ending 
'  ie '.  Thus  '  sugar  '  becomes  '  sugie,'  '  picture  '  '  pickie,'  and 
so  forth.  One  child  was  so  much  in  love  with  this  syllable 
as  to  prefer  it  even  to  the  common  repetition  of  sound  in 
onomatopoetic  imitation,  naming  the  hen  not  'tuck-tuck' 
as  one  might  expect,  but  '  tuckie  '. 

What  strikes  one  in  these  early  modifications  of  our 
verbal  sounds  by  the  child  is  the  care  for  metrical  qualities 
and  the  comparative  disregard  for  articulatory characteristics. 
The  number  of  syllabic  sounds,  the  distribution  of  stress, 
as  well  as  the  rise  and  fall  of  vocal  pitch,  are  the  first  things 

1  Dr.  Postgate  suggests  that  the  current  terms  '  progressive '  and 
*  regressive  '  would  be  better  rendered  by  '  retrospective  '  and  '  pro- 
spective '. 


158  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

to  be  attended  to,  and  these  are,  on  the  whole,  carefully 
rendered  when  the  constituent  sounds  are  changed  into 
other  and  often  very  unlike  ones,  and  the  order  of  the 
sounds  is  reversed.  Again,  the  comparative  fidelity  in 
rendering  the  vowel  sounds  illustrates  the  prominence  of  the 
metrical  or  musical  quality  in  childish  speech.  The  love  of 
reduplication,  of  the  effect  of  assonance  and  rhyme,  illustrates 
the  same  point.  This  may  be  seen  in  some  of  the  more 
playful  sayings  of  the  child  M.,  as  '  Babba  hiding,  Ice 
(Alice)  spiding  (spying) '. 

As  I  have  dwelt  at  some  length  on  the  defective  articu- 
lation of  children,  I  should  like  to  say  that  their  early  per- 
formances, so  far  from  being  a  discredit  to  them,  are  very 
much  to  their  credit.  I,  at  least,  have  often  been  struck 
with  the  sudden  bringing  forth  without  any  preparatory 
audible  trial  of  difficult  combinations,  and  with  a  wonder- 
ful degree  of  accuracy.  A  child  can  often  articulate  better 
than  he  is  wont  to  do.  The  little  girl  M.,  when  one  year 
six  months,  being  asked  teasingly  to  say  '  mudder,'  said 
with  a  laugh  '  mother,'  quite  correctly — but  only  on 
this  one  occasion.  The  precision  which  a  child,  even  in 
the  second  year,  will  often  give  to  our  vocables  is  quite 
surprising,  and  reminds  me  of  the  admirable  exactness 
which,  as  I  have  observed,  other  strangers  to  our  language, 
and  more  especially  perhaps  Russians,  introduce  into  their 
articulation,  putting  our  own  loose  treatment  of  our 
language  to  the  blush.  This  precision,  acquired  as  it  would 
seem  without  any  tentative  practice,  points,  I  suspect,  to  a 
good  deal  of  silent  rehearsal,  nascent  groupings  of  muscular 
actions  which  are  not  carried  far  enough  to  produce  sound. 

The  gradual  development  of  the  child's  articulatory 
powers,  as  indicated  partly  by  the  precision  of  the  sounds 
formed,  partly  by  their  differentiation  and  multiplication, 
is  a  matter  of  great  interest.  At  the  beginning,  when  he 
is  able  to  reproduce  only  a  small  portion  of  a  vocable, 
there  is  of  course  but  little  differentiation.  Thus  it  has 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  159 

been  remarked  by  more  than  one  observer,  that  one  and 
the  same  sound  (so  far  at  least  as  our  ears  can  judge)  will 
represent  different  lingual  signs,  '  ba '  standing  in  the  case 
of  one  child  for  both  'basket'  and  'sheep'  ('  ba  lamb'),  and 
'bo'  for  'box'  and  'bottle'.  Little  by  little  the  sound  grows 
differentiated  into  a  more  definite  and  perfect  form,  and 
it  is  curious  to  note  the  process  of  gradual  evolution  by 
which  the  first  rude  attempt  at  articulate  form  gets  im- 
proved and  refined.  Thus,  writes  a  mother,  "  at  eighteen 
to  twenty  months  'milk'  was  'gink,'  at  twenty-one  months 
it  was  '  ming,'  and  soon  after  two  years  it  was  a  sound 
between  '  mik  '  and  '  milk  '."  The  same  child  in  learning 
to  say  '  lion  '  went  through  the  stages  '  un '  (one  year  eight 
months),  '  ion  '  (two  years),  and  'lion '  (two  years  and  eight 
months).  The  little  girl  M.,  in  learning  the  word  '  break- 
fast,' advanced  by  the  stages  '  bepper,'  '  beffert,'  '  beffust '. 
In  an  example  given  by  Preyer,  'grosspapa'  (grandpapa) 
began  as  '  opapa,'  this  passed  into  "  gropapa,'  and  this 
again  into  '  grosspapa'.  In  another  case  given  by  Schultze 
the  word  '  wasser'  (pronounced  'vasser')  went  through  the 
following  stages:  (i)  'vavaff,'  (2)  'fafaff,'  (3)  'vaffaff,'  (4) 
'  vasse,'  and  (5)  '  vasser  '.  In  this  last  we  have  an  interest- 
ing illustration  of  a  struggle  between  the  imitative  im- 
pulse to  reproduce  the  exact  sound  and  the  impulse  to 
reduplicate  or  repeat  the  sound,  this  last  being  very 
apparent  in  the  introduction  of  the  second  v  and  the  _^in 
the  first  stage,  and  in  the  substitution  of  the  fs  for  v's 
under  the  influence  of  the  dominant  final  sound  in  the 
second  stage.  The  student  of  the  early  stages  of  lan- 
guage growth  might,  one  imagines,  find  many  suggestive 
parallels  in  these  developmental  changes  in  children's 
articulation. 

The  rapidity  of  articulatory  progress  might  be  measured 
by  a  careful  noting  of  the  increase  in  the  number  of  vocables 
mastered  from  month  to  month.  Although  Preyer  and 
others  have  given  lists  of  vocables  used  at  particular  ages, 


l6o  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

and  parents  have  sent  me  lists,  I  have  met  with  no  methodi- 
cal record  of  the  gradual  extension  of  the  articulate  field. 
It  is  obvious  that  any  observations  under  this  head,  save  in 
the  very  early  stages,  can  only  be  very  rough.  No  observer 
of  a  talkative  child,  however  attentive,  can  make  sure  of  all 
the  word-sounds  used.  It  is  to  be  noted,  too,  as  we  have 
seen  above,  that  a  child  will  sometimes  show  that  he  can 
master  a  sound  and  will  even  make  a  temporary  use  of  it, 
without  retaining  it  as  a  part  of  the  permanent  linguistic 
stock.1 

Logical  Side  of  Children's  Language. 

It  is  now  time  to  pass  from  the  mechanical  to  the  logical 
side  of  this  early  child-language,  to  the  meanings  which  the 
small  linguist  gives  to  his  articulate  sounds  and  the  ways  in 
which  he  modifies  these  meanings.  The  growth  of  a  child's 
speech  means  a  concurrent  progress  in  the  mastery  of  word- 
forms  and  in  the  acquisition  of  ideas.  In  this  each  of  the 
two  factors  aids  the  other,  the  advance  of  ideas  pushing  the 
child  to  new  uses  of  sounds,  and  the  growing  facility  in 
word-formation  reacting  powerfully  on  the  ideas,  giving 
them  definiteness  of  outline  and  fixity  of  structure.  I  shall 
not  attempt  here  to  give  a  complete  account  of  the  process, 
but  content  myself  with  touching  on  one  or  two  of  its  more 
interesting  aspects. 

A  child  acquires  the  proper  use  or  application  of  a  word 
by  associating  the  sound  heard  with  the  object,  situation  or 
action  in  connexion  with  which  others  are  observed  to  use 

1  As  samples  of  the  observations  the  following  may  be  taken.  A 
friend  tells  me  his  boy  when  one  year  old  used  just  50  vocables.  The 
performances  vary  greatly.  One  American  girl  of  twenty-two  months 
had  69,  whereas  another  about  the  same  age  had  136,  just  twice  the 
number.  A  German  girl  eighteen  months  old  is  said  by  Preyer  to 
have  used  119  words,  and  to  have  raised  this  to  435  in  the  next  six 
months.  The  composition  of  these  early  vocabularies  will  occupy  us 
presently. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  l6l 

it.  But  the  first  imitation  of  words  does  not  show  that  the 
little  mind  has  seized  their  full  and  precise  meaning.  A 
clear  and  exact  apprehension  of  meaning  comes  but  slowly, 
and  only  as  the  result  of  many  hard  thought-processes, 
comparisons  and  discriminations. 

In  these  first  attempts  to  use  our  speech,  the  child's 
mind  is  innocent  of  grammatical  distinctions.  These  arise 
out  of  the  particular  uses  of  words  in  sentence-structure, 
and  of  this  structure  the  child  has  as  yet  no  inkling.  If, 
then,  following  a  common  practice,  I  speak  of  a  child  of 
twelve  or  fifteen  months  as  naming  an  object,  the  reader 
must  not  suppose  that  I  am  ascribing  to  the  baby-mind 
a  clear  grasp  of  the  function  of  what  grammarians  call 
nouns  (substantives).  All  that  is  implied  in  this  way  of 
speaking,  is  that  the  infant's  first  words  are  used  mainly  as 
recognition-signs.  There  is  from  the  first,  I  conceive,  even 
in  the  gesture  of  pointing  and  saying  '  da  !  '  a  germ  of  this 
naming  process. 

The  progress  of  this  rude  naming  or  articulate  recog- 
nition is  very  interesting.  The  names  first  learnt  are  either 
those  of  individuals,  what  we  call  proper  names,  as 
'  mamma,'  '  nurse,'  or  those  which,  like  '  bath,'  '  bow-wow,' 
are  at  first  applied  to  one  particular  object.  It  is  often 
supposed  that  a  child  uses  these  as  true  singular  names, 
recognising  individual  objects  as  such.  But  this  is  pretty 
certainly  an  error.  He  cannot  note  differences  well  enough 
or  grasp  a  sufficient  number  of  differential  marks  to  know 
an  individual  as  such,  and  he  will,  as  occasion  arises,  quite 
spontaneously  extend  his  names  to  other  things  which 
happen  to  have  some  interesting  and  notable  points  in 
common  with  the  first.  Thus  '  bow-wow,'  though  first 
applied  to  one  particular  dog,  is,  as  we  know,  at  once  ex- 
tended to  other  dogs,  pictures  of  dogs,  and  not  infrequently 
other  things  as  well.  If  then  we  speak  of  the  child  as 
generalising  or  widening  the  application  of  his  terms,  we 
must  not  be  taken  to  mean  that  he  goes  through  a  process 

ii 


1 62  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

of  comparing  things  which  he  perceives  to  be  distinct,  and 
discovering  a  likeness  in  these,  but  that  he  merely  assimi- 
lates or  recognises  something  like  that  which  he  has  seen 
before  without  troubling  to  note  the  differences. 

This  extension  of  names  or  generalising  process  proceeds 
primarily  and  mainly  by  the  feeling  for  the  likenesses  or  the 
common  aspects  of  things,  though  as  we  shall  see  presently 
their  connexions  of  time  and  place  afford  a  second  and 
subordinate  means  of  extension.  The  transference  of  a 
name  from  object  to  object  through  this  apprehension  of  a 
likeness  or  assimilation  has  already  been  touched  upon.  It 
moves  along  thoroughly  childish  lines,  and  constitutes  one 
of  the  most  striking  and  interesting  of  the  manifestations 
of  precocious  originality.  Yet  if  unconventional  in  its  mode 
of  operation  it  is  essentially  thought-activity,  a  connecting 
of  like  with  like,  and  a  rudimentary  grouping  of  things  in 
classes. 

This  tendency  to  comprehend  like  things  or  situations 
under  a  single  articulate  sign  is  seen  already  in  the  use  of 
the  early  indicative  sign  '  atta '  (all  gone).  It  was  used  by 
Preyer's  child  to  mark  not  only  the  departure  of  a  thing 
but  the  putting  out  of  a  flame,  later  on,  an  empty  glass 
or  other  vessel.  By  another  child  it  was  extended  to  the 
ending  of  music,  the  closing  of  a  drawer  and  so  on.  Here, 
however,  the  various  applications  probably  answer  more  to 
a  common  feeling  of  ending  or  missing  than  to  an  appre- 
hension of  a  common  objective  situation. 

Coming  to  words  which  we  call  names  we  find  that  the 
child  will  often  extend  a  recognition-sign  from  one  object 
to  a  second,  and  to  our  thinking  widely  dissimilar  object 
through  the  discovery  of  some  analogy.  Such  extension, 
moving  rather  along  poetic  lines  than  those  of  our  logical 
classifications,  is  apt,  as  we  have  seen,  to  wear  a  quaint 
metaphorical  aspect.  A  star,  for  example,  looked  at,  I 
suppose,  as  a  small  bright  spot,  was  called  by  one  child  an 
eye.  The  child  M.  called  the  opal  globe  of  a  lighted  lamp 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  163 

a  '  moon  '.  '  Pin  '  was  extended  by  another  child  to  a  crumb 
just  picked  up,  a  fly,  and  a  caterpillar,  and  seemed  to  mean 
something  little  to  be  taken  between  the  fingers.  The  same 
<:hild  used  the  sound  '  'at '  (hat)  for  anything  put  on  the 
head,  including  a  hair-brush.  Another  child  used  the  word 
4  key  '  for  other  bright  metal  things,  as  money.  Romanes' 
child  extended  the  word  'star,'  the  first  vocable  learned 
after  '  Mamma '  and  '  Papa,'  to  bright  objects  generally, 
candles,  gas-flames,  etc.  Taine  speaks  of  a  child  of  one 
year  who  after  first  applying  the  word  "  fafer "  (from 
""chemin  de  fer")  to  railway  engines  went  on  to  transfer 
it  to  a  steaming  coffee-pot  and  everything  that  hissed  or 
smoked  or  made  a  noise.  In  these  last  illustrations  we 
have  plainly  a  rudimentary  process  of  classification.  Any 
point  of  likeness,  provided  it  is  of  sufficient  interest  to 
strike  the  attention,  may  thus  serve  as  a  basis  of  childish 
classification. 

As  with  names  of  things  so  with  those  of  actions.  The 
crackling  noise  of  the  fire  was  called  by  one  child  'barking,1 
and  the  barking  of  a  dog  was  named  by  another  'coughing'. 
We  see  from  this  that  the  particular  line  of  analogical  ex- 
tension followed  by  a  child  will  depend  on  the  nature  of 
the  first  impressions  or  experiences  which  serve  as  his 
starting  point. 

A  like  originality  is  apt  to  show  itself  in  the  first  crude 
attempt  to  seize  and  name  the  relations  of  things.  The 
child  C.  called  dipping  bread  in  gravy  'ba'  (bath).  Another 
child  extended  the  word  'door'  to  "everything  that  stop- 
ped up  an  opening  or  prevented  an  exit,  including  the 
<:ork  of  a  bottle,  and  the  little  table  that  fastened  him  in 
his  high  chair". 

In  these  extensions  we  see  the  tendency  of  child-thought 
towards  '  concretism,'  or  the  use  of  a  simple  concrete  idea  in 
order  to  express  a  more  abstract  idea.  Children  frequently 
express  the  contrast  big,  little,  by  the  pretty  figurative 
language  '  Mamma  '  and  '  baby  '.  Thus  a  small  coin  was 


164  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

called  by  an  American  child  a  '  baby  dollar '.  Romanes^ 
daughter,  named  I  Ida,  pointed  out  the  sheep  in  a  picture 
as  'Mamma-ba'  and  the  lambs  as  '  Ilda-ba '.  It  is  some- 
what the  same  process  when  the  child  extends  an  idea 
obtained  from  the  most  impressive  experience  of  childish 
difficulty,  viz.,  '  too  big,1  so  as  to  make  it  do  duty  for  the 
abstract  notion  '  too  difficult '  in  general. 

In  this  extension  of  language  by  the  child  we  may 
discern,  along  with  this  play  of  the  feeling  for  similarity,, 
the  working  of  association.  This  is  illustrated  by  the  case 
of  Darwin's  grandchild,  who  when  just  beginning  to  speak 
used  the  common  sign  '  quack  '  for  duck,  then  extended  this 
to  water,  then,  following  up  this  associative  transference  by 
a  double  process  of  generalisation,  made  the  sound  serve 
as  the  name  of  all  birds  and  insects  on  the  one  hand,  and 
all  fluid  substances  on  the  other.1 

The  transference  of  the  name  'quack'  from  the  animal 
to  the  water  is  a  striking  example  of  the  tendency  of  the 
young  mind  to  view  things  which  are  presented  together 
as  belonging  one  to  another  and  in  a  manner  identical. 
Another  curious  instance  is  given  by  Professor  Minto,  in 
which  a  child,  who  applied  the  word  '  mambro '  to  her 
nurse,  went  on  to  extend  it  by  associative  transference  to  the 
nurse's  sewing  machine,  then  by  analogy  applied  it  to  a 
hand-organ  in  the  street,  later  on,  through  an  association 
of  hand-organ  with  monkey,  to  his  india-rubber  monkey. 
Here  we  have  a  whole  history  of  change  of  word-mean- 
ing illustrating  in  curiously  equal  measure  the  play  of 
assimilation  and  of  association,  and  falling  within  a  period 
of  two  years. a 

There  is  another  way  in  which  children  are  said  to 
'  extend '  names  somewhat  analogous  to  the  processes  of 
assimilation  and  associate  transference.  They  are  very 
fond  of  using  the  same  word  for  opposed  or  other 

1  Quoted  by  Romanes,  Mental  Evolution  in  Man,  p.  283. 

2  Logic  (University  Extension  Manuals),  pp.  83-84. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  165 

•correlative  ideas.  In  some  cases  we  can  see  that  this  is 
due  merely  to  confusion  or  want  of  discrimination.  When, 
for  example,  Preyer's  boy  confused  '  too  little '  with  '  too 
much,'  and  '  yesterday '  with  '  to-morrow/ going  so  far  as 
to  make  a  compound  '  heitgestern '  (i.e.,  heutegestern)  to 
include  both,1  it  is  easy  to  see  that  the  child's  mind  had 
reached  merely  the  vague  idea  unsuitable  in  quantity  in 
the  one  case,  and  time  not  present  in  the  other ;  and  that 
he  failed  to  differentiate  these  ideas.  In  other  cases  where 
correlatives  are  confused,  as  when  a  child  extended  the 
sign  of  asking  for  an  eatable  ('  bit-ye ')  to  the  act  of  offer- 
ing anything  to  another,  or  when  as  in  C.'s  case  '  spend ' 
was  made  to  do  duty  for  'cost,'  'borrow'  for  'lend,'  and 
'learn'  for  'teach,'  the  explanation  is  slightly  different. 
A  child  can  only  acquire  an  idea  of  abstract  relations 
slowly  and  by  stages.  Such  words  as  lend,  teach,  call 
up  first  a  pictorial  idea  of  an  action  in  which  two  persons 
are  seen  to  be  concerned.  But  the  exact  nature  of  the 
relation,  and  the  difference  in  its  aspect  as  we  start  from 
the  one  or  the  other  term,  are  not  perceived.  Thus  in 
thinking  of  a  purchase  over  the  counter,  a  child  may  be 
supposed  to  image  the  action  but  not  clearly  to  distinguish 
the  part  taken  by  the  person  who  buys  and  gives  out  money 
('  spends ')  and  the  part  taken  by  the  person  who  demands 
a  price  or  fixes  the  cost.  Perhaps  we  get  near  this  vague 
awareness  of  a  relation  when  we  are  aiding  a  violinist  to 
tune  his  instrument.  We  may  know  that  his  note  and  our 
piano  note  do  not  accord,  and  yet  be  quite  unable  to  deter- 
mine their  exact  relation,  and  to  fix  the  one  as  higher,  the 
-other  as  lower. 

An  interesting  variety  of  this  extension  of  names  to 
correlatives  is  the  transference  of  the  attributes  of  causal 
agent  to  passive  object,  and  vice  versa.  Thus  a  little  girl 
of  four  called  her  parasol  when  blown  by  the  wind  '  a  windy 
parasol,'  and  a  stone  that  made  her  hand  sore  'a  very. sore 

1  See  op.  cit.,  p.  420,  also  pp.  414  and  418. 


166  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

stone'.  A  little  Italian  girl  that  had  taken  some  nasty 
medicines  expressed  the  fact  by  calling  herself  nasty 
('  bimba  cattiva  '}.1 

There  is  much  in  the  whole  of  these  changes  introduced 
by  the  child  into  the  uses  or  meanings  of  words  which  may 
remind  one  of  the  changes  which  go  on  in  the  growth  of 
languages  in  communities.  Thus  the  child's  metaphorical 
use  of  words,  his  setting  forth  of  an  abstract  idea  by  some 
analogous  concrete  image,  has  its  counterpart,  as  we  know, 
in  the  early  stages  of  human  language.  Tribes  which  have 
no  abstract  signs  employ  a  metaphor  exactly  as  the  child 
does.  Our  own  language  preserves  the  traces  of  this  early 
figurative  use  of  words ;  as  in  '  imbecile,'  weak,  which 
originally  meant  leaning  on  a  staff,  and  so  forth.2 

Again,  we  may  trace  in  the  development  of  languages- 
the  counterpart  of  those  processes  by  which  children 
spontaneously  expand  what  logicians  call  the  denotation 
of  their  names.  The  word  'sun'  has  only  quite  recently 
undergone  this  kind  of  extension  by  being  applied  to  other 
centres  of  systems  besides  our  familiar  sun.  The  multi- 
plicity of  meanings  of  certain  words,  as  '  post,'  '  stock  '  and 
so  forth,  points  to  the  double  process  of  assimilative  and 
associative  extension  which  we  saw  illustrated  in  the  use 
of  the  child's  word  '  mambro  '. 

Once  more,  the  child's  extension  of  a  word  from  an 
idea  to  its  correlative  has  its  parallel  in  the  adult's  use  of 
language.  As  the  vulgar  expression  '  I'll  larn  you'  shows 
(cf.  the  Anglo-Saxon  leorniari),  a  word  may  come  to  mean 
both  to  teach  and  to  become  taught.  A  like  embracing 
of  agent  and  object  acted  upon  by  the  same  word  is  seen 
in  the  '  active '  and  '  passive '  meanings  of  words  like  the 
Latin  penetrabilis  ('  piercing  '  and  '  pierceable  '),  and  in  the 
'  objective '  and  '  subjective  '  meanings  of  '  pleasant '  and 

1  Paola  Lombroso,  Saggi  di  Psicologia  del  Bambino,  p.  16. 

2  See  Trench's  account  of  poetry  in  words,  On  the  Study  of  Words* 
lect.  vi. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  1 67 

similar  words.  We  are  beginning,  like  the  little  girl 
quoted  above,  to  speak  of  a  '  sore '  topic.  Lastly,  the 
movement  of  thought  underlying  the  saying  of  the  little 
Italian  girl,  'nasty  baby,'  seems  to  be  akin  to  that  of  the 
savage  when  he  supposes  that  he  appropriates  the  qualities 
of  that  which  he  eats. 

The  changes  here  touched  upon  have  to  do  with  what 
philologists  call  generalisation.  As  supplementary  to  these 
there  is  in  the  case  of  the  growth  of  a  community-language 
a  process  of  specialisation,  as  when  '  physician  '  from 
meaning  a  student  of  nature  has  come  to  mean  one  who 
has  acquired  and  can  practically  apply  one  branch  of  nature- 
knowledge.  In  the  case  of  the  child  we  have  an  analogue 
of  this  in  the  gradual  limitation  of  names  to  narrower 
classes  or  to  individuals  as  the  result  of  carrying  out  certain 
processes  of  comparison  and  discrimination.  Thus  '  ba-ba,' 
which  is  used  at  first  for  a  miscellaneous  crowd  of  woolly 
or  hairy  quadrupeds,  gets  specialised  as  a  name  for  a  sheep, 
and  the  much-abused  '  papa '  becomes  restricted  to  its 
rightful  owner. 

This  process  of  differentiation  and  specialisation  assumes 
an  interesting  form  in  a  characteristic  feature  of  the  language- 
invention  of  both  children  and  savages,  viz.,  the  formation  of 
compound  words.  These  compounds  are  often  true  meta- 
phors. Thus  in  the  case  already  quoted  where  an  eye-lid  was 
called  an  eye-curtain  the  child  may  be  said  to  have  resorted 
to  a  metaphorical  way  of  describing  the  lid.  It  is  much  the 
same  when  M.  at  the  age  of  one  year  nine  months  invented 
the  expression  '  bwite  (bright)  penny '  for  silver  pieces.  A 
slightly  different  example  is  the  compound  '  foot-wing ' 
invented  by  the  child  C.  to  describe  the  limb  of  a  seal.  As 
a  further  variety  of  this  metaphoric  formation  I  may  quote 
the  pretty  name  'tell-wind '  which  a  boy  of  four  years  and 
eight  months  hit  upon  as  a  name  for  the  weather-vane. 

In  these  and  similar  cases,  there  is  at  once  an  analogical 
transference  of  meaning  (e.g.,  from  curtain  to  lid)  or  process 


1 68  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

of  generalisation,  and  a  limitation  of  meaning  by  the 
appended  or  qualifying  word  '  eye,'  and  so  a  process  of 
specialisation. 

In  certain  cases  the  analogical  extension  gives  place 
to  what  we  should  call  a  classification.  One  child  for 
example,  knowing  the  word  steam-ship  and  wanting  the 
name  sailing-ship,  invented  the  form  '  wind-ship  '.  The  little 
girl  M.,  when  one  year  and  nine  months  old,  showed  quite 
a  passion  for  classing  by  help  of  compounds,  arranging  the 
rooms  into  '  morner-room,'  '  dinner-room  '  (she  was  fond  of 
adding  '  er '  at  this  time)  and  '  nursery-room  '. 

It  might  be  supposed  from  a  logical  point  of  view  that 
in  these  inventions  the  qualifying  or  determining  word  would 
come  more  naturally  after  the  generic  name,  as  in  the  French 
moulin  a  vent,  cygne  noir.  I  have  heard  of  one  English 
child  who  used  the  form  '  mill-wind  '  in  preference  to  '  wind- 
mill,' and  the  order  'dog  black'  in  preference  to  'black  dog'. 
It  would  be  worth  while  to  note  any  similar  instances. 

In  these  inventions,  again,  we  may  detect  a  close  resem- 
blance between  children's  language  and  that  of  savages.  In 
presence  of  a  new  object  a  savage  behaves  very  much  as  a 
child,  he  shapes  a  new  name  out  of  familiar  ones,  a  name 
that  commonly  has  much  of  the  metaphorical  character. 
Thus  the  Aztecs  called  a  boat  a  '  water-house '  ;  and  the 
Vancouver  islanders  when  they  saw  a  screw-steamer  called 
it  the  '  kick-kicket  '-1 

A  somewhat  different  class  of  word-inventions  is  that 
in  which  a  child  frames  a  new  word  on  the  analogy 
of  known  words.  A  common  case  is  the  invention 
of  new  substantives  from  verbs  after  the  pattern  of  other 
substantives.  The  results  are  often  quaint  enough.  Some- 
times it  is  the  agent  who  is  named  by  the  new  word,  as 
when  the  boy  C.  talked  of  the  '  Rainer,'  the  fairy  who 
makes  rain,  or  when  another  little  boy  dubbed  a  teacher 
the  '  lessoner '.  Sometimes  it  is  the  product  of  the  action 

1  Tylor,  Anthropology,  chap.  v. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  169 

that  is  named,  as  when  the  same  child  C.  and  the  deaf-mute 
Laura  Bridgman  both  invented  the  form  '  thinks '  for 
'  thoughts  '.  In  much  the  same  way  a  boy  of  three  called 
the  holes  which  he  dug  in  his  garden  his  '  digs  '.  The  re- 
verse process,  the  formation  of  a  verb  from  a  substantive, 
also  occurs.  Thus  one  child  invented  the  form  '  dag '  for 
striking  with  a  dagger  ;  and  Preyer's  boy  when  two  years 
and  two  months  old  formed  the  verb  '  messen '  to  express 
cut  from  the  substantive  '  messer '  (a  knife).  It  was 
probably  a  similar  process  when  the  child  M.  at  one  year 
ten  months,  after  seeing  a  motionless  worm  and  being  told 
that  it  was  dead,  asked  to  see  another  worm  '  deading '. 
The  same  child  coined  the  neat  verb-form  '  unparcel '. 
This  readiness  to  form  verbs  from  substantives  and  vice 
versd,  which  is  abundantly  illustrated  in  the  development 
of  language,  is  without  doubt  connected  with  the  primitive 
and  natural  mode  of  thinking.  The  object  is  of  greatest 
interest  both  to  the  child  and  to  primitive  man  as  an  agent, 
or  as  the  last  stage  or  result  of  an  action. 

In  certain  of  these  original  formations  we  may  detect 
a  fine  feeling  for  verbal  analogy.  Thus  a  French  boy, 
after  killing  the  '  limaces '  (snails)  which  were  eating 
the  plants  in  the  garden,  dignified  his  office  by  styling 
himself  a  'limarcier';  where  the  inventive  faculty  was  no 
doubt  led  by  the  analogy  of  '  voiturier '  formed  from 
"  voiture  V 

In  other  verbal  formations  it  is  difficult  to  determine 
the  model  which  is  followed.  Signorina  Lombroso 
gives  a  good  example.  A  little  girl  of  two  and  a  half 
years  had  observed  that  when  her  mother  allowed  her 
to  take,  eat,  or  drink  something,  she  would  say  'prendilo'' 
(take  it),  'bevilo'  (drink  it),  or  'mangialo'  (eat  it).  She  pro- 
ceeded to  make  a  kind  of  adjective  or  substantive  out  of 
each  of  these,  asking  'e  prendilo?'  'e  bevilo?'  *e  man- 
gialo?' i.e.,  '  Is  it  takable  or  a  case  of  taking?'  etc.,  when 

1  Compayre,  op.  cit.,  p.  249,  where  other  examples  are  given. 


170  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

she  wanted  to  take,  drink,  or  eat  something.1  By  such 
skilful  artifices  does  the  little  word-builder  find  his  way  to 
the  names  which  he  has  need  of. 

In  certain  cases  these  original  constructions  are  of  a 
more  clumsy  order  and  due  to  a  partial  forgetfulness  of  a 
word  and  an  effort  to  complete  it.  Thus  a  boy  of  four 
spoke  of  being  '  sorrified,'  where  he  was  evidently  led  out  of 
the  right  track  by  the  analogy  of '  horrified  '.  The  same  little 
boy  who  talked  of  his  '  digs  '  used  the  word  '  magnicious > 
for  'magnificent'.  This  is  a  choice  example  of  word- 
transformation.  No  doubt  the  child  was  led  by  the  feeling 
for  the  sound  of  this  termination  in  other  grand  words,  as 
'  ambitious  '.  Possibly,  too,  he  might  have  heard  the  form 
'  magnesia '  and  been  influenced  by  a  reminiscence  of  this 
sound-complex.  The  talk  of  '  Jeames '  with  which  Mr. 
Punch  makes  us  acquainted  is  full  of  just  such  delightful 
missings  of  the  mark  in  trying  to  reproduce  big  words. 

Sentence-building. 

We  may  now  follow  the  child  in  his  later  and  more 
ambitious  linguistic  efforts.  The  transition  to  this  higher 
plane  is  marked  by  the  use  of  the  completed  form  of 
thought,  the  sentence. 

At  first,  as  already  pointed  out,  there  is  no  sentence- 
structure.  The  child  begins  to  talk  by  using  single  words. 
These  words  consist  of  what  we  call  substantives,  as 
'  Mamma,'  '  nurse,'  '  milk,'  a  few  adjectives,  as  '  hot,'  '  nice,* 
'good,'  a  still  smaller  number  of  adverbial  signs,  as  'ta-ta,' 
or  'away,'  'over,'  'down,'  'up,1  and  one  or  two  verb-forms,, 
apparently  imperatives,  as  '  go '.  The  exact  order  in 
which  these  appear,  and  the  proportion  between  the 
different  classes  of  constituents  at  a  particular  age,  say 
two  and  a  half  or  three,  appear  to  vary  greatly.  Words 

1  Op.  cit.,  p.  12. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  I/ 1 

descriptive  of  actions,  though  very  few  at  first,  appear  to 
grow  numerous  in  a  later  stage.1 

In  speaking  of  these  words  as  substantives,  adjectives, 
and  so  forth,  I  am  merely  adopting  a  convenient  mode  of 
description.  We  must  not  suppose  that  the  words  as  used 
in  this  simple  disjointed  talk  have  their  full  grammatical 
value.  It  is  not  generally  recognised  that  the  single-worded 
utterance  of  the  child  is  an  abbreviated  sentence  or 
'  sentence-word  '  analogous  to  the  sentence-words  found  in 
the  simplest  known  stage  of  adult  language.  As  with  the  race 
so  with  the  child,  the  sentence  precedes  the  word.  More- 
over, each  of  the  child's  so-called  words  in  his  single-worded 
talk  stands  for  a  considerable  variety  of  sentence-forms. 
Thus  the  words  in  the  child's  vocabulary  which  we  call 
substantives  do  duty  for  verbs  and  so  forth.  As  Preyer 
remarks,  'chair'  (stuhl)  means  'There  is  no  chair,'  'I 
want  to  be  put  in  the  chair,'  '  The  chair  is  broken,'  and 
so  forth.  In  like  manner  '  dow '  (down)  may  mean  '  The 
spoon  has  fallen  down,'  '  I  am  down,'  '  I  want  to  go  down,' 
etc.2  The  particular  shade  of  meaning  intended  is  indicated 
by  intonation  and  gesture. 

This  sentence-construction  begins  with  a  certain 
timidity.  The  age  at  which  it  is  first  observed  varies 
greatly.  It  seems  in  most  cases  to  be  somewhere  about 
the  twenty-first  month,  yet  I  find  good  observers  among 
my  correspondents  giving  as  dates  eighteen  and  a  half 
and  nineteen  months  ;  and  a  friend  of  mine,  a  Professor 
of  Literature,  tells  me  that  his  boy  formed  simple 
sentences  as  early  as  fifteen  months.  We  commonly  have 
at  first  quite  short  sentences  formed  by  two  words  in 
apposition.  These  may  consist  of  what  we  should  call 
an  adjective  added  to  and  qualifying  a  substantive,  as 
in  the  simple  utterance  of  the  child  C,  '  Big  bir '  (bird), 
or  the  exclamation,  '  Papa  no '  (Papa's  nose) ;  or  they 

1  For  lists  of  vocabularies  and  an  analysis  of  their  composition  see 
Preyer,  op.  cit.  (4th  ed.),  p.  372  ff. ;  Tracy,  Psychology  of  Childhood,  p.  76  ff. 

2  See  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  p.  361  :  Romanes,  op.  cit.,  p.  296  ff. 


1/2  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

may  arise  by  a  combination  of  substantives,  as  in  the 
sentence  given  by  Tracy,  '  Papa  cacker,'  i.e.,  '  Papa  has 
crackers,'  and  one  quoted  by  Preyer,  '  Auntie  cake ' 
(German,  '  Danna  Kuha,'  i.e.,  '  Tante  Kuche ')  for  '  Auntie 
has  given  me  cake '  ;  and  in  a  somewhat  different  example 
of  a  compound  sentence  also  given  by  Preyer,  '  Home 
milk'  (German,  '  Haim  Mimi '),  interpreted  as  '  I  want  to 
go  home  and  have  milk '.  In  the  case  of  one  child  about 
the  age  of  twenty-three  months  most  of  the  sentences  were 
composed  of  two  words,  one  of  which  was  a  verb  in  the 
imperative.  The  love  of  commanding,  so  strong  in  the 
child,  makes  the  use  of  the  imperative,  as  is  seen  in  this 
case,  very  common.  M.'s  first  performance  in  sentence- 
building  (at  eighteen  and  a  half  months)  was,  '  Mamma, 
tie,'  i.e.,  '  tie  gloves  '. 

Little  by  little  the  learner  manages  longer  sentences, 
economising  his  resources  to  the  utmost,  troubling  nothing 
about  inflections  or  the  insertion  of  prepositions  so  as  to 
indicate  precise  relations,  but  leaving  his  hearer  to  dis- 
cover his  meaning  as  best  he  may ;  and  it  is  truly  wonder- 
ful how  much  the  child  manages  to  express  in  this  rude 
fashion.  A  boy  nineteen  and  a  half  months  old  gave  this 
elaborate  order  to  his  father :  '  Dada  toe  toe  ba,'  that  is, 
'  Dada  is  to  go  and  put  his  toes  in  the  bath '.  Pollock's 
little  girl  in  the  first  essay  at  sentence-building,  recorded 
at  the  age  of  twenty-one  and  a  half  months,  actually 
managed  a  neat  antithesis :  '  Cabs  dati,  clam  clin,'  that  is 
to  say,  '  Cabs  are  dirty,  and  the  perambulator  is  clean '. 
Preyer's  boy  in  the  beginning  of  the  third  year  brought 
out  the  following,  '  Mimi  atta  teppa  papa  oi,'  that  is  to  say, 
'  Milch  atta  Teppich  Papa  fui,'  which  appears  to  have 
signified,  "  The  milk  is  gone,  it  is  on  the  carpet,  and  papa 
said  'Fie'".  It  may  be  added  that  the  difficulties  of 
deciphering  these  early  sentences  is  aggravated  by  the 
frequent  resort  to  slurs,  as  when  a  child  says,  '  m'  out'  for 
'  take  me  out,'  "t  on  '  for  '  put  it  on  '. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  173 

The  order  of  words  in  these  first  tentative  sentences 
is  noticeable.  Sometimes  the  subject  is  placed  after 
the  predicate,  as  in  an  example  given  by  Pollock, 
'  Run  away  man,'  i.e.,  '  The  man  runs  (or  has  run)  away,' 
and  in  the  still  quainter  example  given  by  the  same  writer, 
'  Out-pull-baby  'pecs  (spectacles),'  i.e.,  '  Baby  pulls  or  will 
pull  out  the  spectacles'.  In  like  manner  the  adjective 
used  as  predicate  may  precede  the  subject,  as  in  the 
examples  given  by  Maillet,  '  Jolie  la  fleur,'  etc.1  Some- 
times, again,  the  object  comes  before  the  verb,  as  ap- 
parently in  the  following  example  given  by  Miss  Shinn  : 
a  little  girl  delighted  at  the  prospect  of  going  out  to  see 
the  moon  exclaimed,  "  Moo-ky  (sky),  baby  shee  (see)  ".2 
Here  is  a  delightful  example  of  a  transposition  of  subject 
and  object.  A  boy  two  years  and  three  months  asked, 
'Did  Ack  (Alec)  chocke  an  apple?'  i.e.,  'Did  an  apple 
choke  Alec  ? '  though  in  this  case  we  very  probably  have  to 
do  with  a  misunderstanding  of  the  action  choke.  Other 
kinds  of  inversion  occur  when  more  complex  experiments 
are  attempted,  as  in  connecting  '  my '  with  an  adjective. 
Thus  one  child  said  prettily,  '  Poor  my  friends ' ; 3  which 
archaic  form  may  be  compared  with  the  following  Gallic- 
looking  idiom  used  by  M.  at  the  age  of  one  year  ten 
months  :  '  How  Babba  (baby,  i.e.,  herself)  does  feed  nicely  ! ' 
The  same  little  girl  put  the  auxiliary  out  of  its  place, 
saying,  'Tan  (can)  Babba  wite '  for  'Baby  can  write,' 
though  this  was  probably  a  reminiscence  of  the  question- 
form. 

These  inversions  of  our  familiar  order  are  suggestive. 
They  have  some  resemblance  to  the  curious  order  which 
appears  in  the  spontaneous  sign-making  of  deaf-mutes. 
Thus  a  deaf-mute  answered  the  question, '  Who  made  God?' 

1  See  Compayre,  op.  cit.,  p.  206. 
-  Notes  on  the  Development  of  a  Child,  p.  84. 

3  Canton,  The  Invisible  Playmate,  p.  32,  who  adds  that  this  exactly 
answers  to  the  form,  "  Good  my  lord  ! " 


1/4  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

by  saying,  "  God  made  nothing,"  i.e.,  "  nothing  made  God  ". 
Similarly  the  deaf-mute  Laura  Bridgman  expressed  the 
petition,  '  Give  Laura  bread,'  by  the  form,  '  Laura  bread 
give  '.l  Such  inversions,  as  we  know,  are  allowable  and 
common  in  certain  languages,  e.g.,  Latin.  The  study  of  the 
syntax  of  child-language  and  of  the  sign-making  of  deaf- 
mutes  might  suggest  that  our  English  order  is  not  in  certain 
cases  the  most  natural  one. 

A  somewhat  similar  inversion  of  what  seems  to  us  the 
proper  order  appears  in  the  child's  first  attempts  at  negation. 
The  child  C.  early  in  his  third  year  expressed  the  idea  that 
he  was  not  going  into  the  sea  thus  :  '  N.  (his  own  name)  go 
in  water,  no'.  Similarly  Pollock's  child  expressed  ac- 
quiescence in  a  prohibition  in  this  manner,  '  Baby  have 
papa  (pepper)  no/  where  the  '  no  '  followed  without  a  pause. 
The  same  order  appears  in  the  case  of  French  children,  e.g., 
*  Papa  non,'  i.e.,  '  It  is  not  Papa,'  and  seems  to  be  a  common, 
if  not  a  universal  form  of  the  first  half-spontaneous  sentence- 
building.  Here  again  we  see  an  analogy  to  the  syntax  of 
deaf-mutes,  who  appear  to  append  the  sign  of  negation  in 
a  similar  way,  e.g.,  '  Teacher  I  beat,  deceive,  scold  no,'  i.e., 
'  I  must  not  beat,  deceive,  scold  my  teacher '.  We  see 
something  like  it,  too,  in  the  formations  of  savage-languages, 
as  when  '  fool  no '  comes  to  be  the  sign  of '  not  fool/  that  is 
of  wise.2  When  '  not '  comes  into  use  it  is  apt  to  be  put  in 
a  wrong  place,  as  when  the  little  girl  M.  said,  '  No  Babba 
look'  (i.e.,  'Babba  will  not  look'),  and  'Mr.  Dill  not  did  turn' 
for  '  Mr.  Gill  did  not  come  '.3 

Another  closely  related  characteristic  of  this  early 
childish  sentence-building  is  the  love  of  antithesis  under  the 

1  See  Romanes,  op.  cit.,  p.  116  f.,  where  other  examples  may  be 
found. 

2  Annual  Report  of  the  Bureau  of  Ethnology,  1879-80,  p.  391  ff. 

3  It  may  be  added  that  this  child  regularly  used  '  not '  or  '  n't '  as 
a  negating  or  cancelling  sign  for  the  whole  sentence,  saying,  for  ex- 
ample, '  Babba  mus'n't  go  in,'  for  '  Babba  may  stay  out '. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  1/5 

form  of  two  balancing  statements.  Thus  a  child  will  often 
oppose  an  affirmative  to  a  negative  statement  as  a  means  of 
bringing  out  the  full  meaning  of  the  former.  The  boy  C., 
for  example,  would  say,  '  This  a  nice  bow-wow,  not  nasty 
bow-wow  '.  The  little  girl  M.  said,  '  Boo  (the  name  of  her 
cat)  dot  (got)  tail ;  poor  Babba  dot  no  tail,'  proceeding  to 
search  for  a  tail  under  her  skirts.  This  use  of  a  negative 
statement  by  way  of  contrast  or  opposition  to  an  affirma- 
tive grew  in  the  case  of  one  child  aged  two  years  and  two 
months  into  a  habit  of  description  by  negations.  Thus  an 
orange  was  described  by  the  saying,  '  No,  'tisn't  apple,' 
porridge  by  '  No, 'tisn't  bread  and  milk  '.  It  is  interesting 
to  note  that  deaf-mutes  proceed  in  a  similar  fashion  by  way 
of  antithetic  negative  statement.  Thus  one  of  these  ex- 
pressed the  thought,  '  I  must  love  and  honour  my  teacher",' 
by  the  order,  '  Teacher  I  beat,  deceive,  scold  no ! — I  love 
honour  yes  ! ' l 

These  first  essays  in  the  construction  of  sentences  illus- 
trate the  skill  of  the  child  in  eking  out  his  scanty  vocabulary 
by  help  of  a  metaphorical  transference  of  meaning.  Taine 
gives  a  charming  example  of  this  device.  A  little  girl 
of  eighteen  months  had  acquired  the  word  '  Coucou  '  as 
used  by  her  mother  or  nurse  when  playfully  hiding  behind 
a  door  or  chair,  and  the  expression  'ca  brule'  as  employed 
to  warn  her  that  her  dinner  was  too  hot,  or  that  she  must 
put  on  her  hat  in  the  garden  to  keep  off  the  hot  sun.  One 
day  on  seeing  the  sun  disappear  behind  a  hill  she  ex- 
claimed, '  A  bule  coucou  '.2 

It  is  a  fearful  moment  when  the  child  first  tries  his  hand 
at  inflections,  and,  more  especially  in  our  language,  those 
of  verbs.  Pollock's  child  made  the  attempt,  and  success- 
fully, at  the  age  of  twenty-two  months.  Such  first  essays 

1  A  curious  example  of  negative  antithesis  is  given  by  Perez, 
op.  cit.,  p.  196.  On  other  analogies  between  the  syntax  of  children  and 
of  deaf-mutes,  see  Compayre,  op.  cit.,  p.  251  f. 

-  On  Intelligence,  pt.  i.,  bk.  i.,  chap,  ii.,  sect.  vi. 


1/6  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

are  probably  examples  of  pure  imitation,  the  precise  forms 
used  having  been  previously  heard  from  others.  Hence 
while  they  show  a  growing  power  of  thought,  of  a  differenc- 
ing of  the  relations  of  number  and  time,  they  do  not  involve 
verbal  construction  properly  so  called.  This  last  appears 
as  soon  as  the  child  carries  over  his  knowledge  of  particu- 
lar cases  of  verbal  inflection  and  applies  it  to  new  words. 
This  involves  a  nascent  appreciation  of  the  reason  or  rule 
according  to  which  words  are  modified.  The  development 
of  this  feeling  for  the  general  mode  of  verbal  change  under- 
lies all  the  later  advance  in  correct  speaking. 

While  the  little  explorer  in  the  terra  incognita  of  lan- 
guage can  proceed  safely  in  this  direction  up  to  a  certain 
point  he  is  apt,  as  we  all  know,  to  stumble  now  and  again  ; 
nor  is  this  to  be  wondered  at  when  we  remember  the  in- 
tricacies, the  irregularities,  which  characterise  a  language 
like  ours.  In  trying,  for  example,  to  manage  the  preterite 
of  an  English  verb  he  is  certain,  as,  indeed,  is  the  foreigner, 
to  go  wrong.  The  direction  of  the  error  is  often  in  the 
transformation  of  the  weak  to  the  strong  form  ;  as  when 
'  screamed  '  becomes  '  scram,'  '  split '  (preterite)  '  splat '  or 
'  splut,'  and  so  forth.  In  other  cases  the  child  will  convert 
a  strong  into  a  weak  form,  as  when  Laura  Bridgman,  like 
many  another  child,  would  say,  '  I  eated,'  '  I  seed,'  and  so 
forth.1  Sometimes,  again,  delightful  doublings  of  the  past 
tense  occur,  as  '  sawed  '  for  '  saw,'  '  eatened  '  for  '  eaten,' 
'didn't  saw'  for  'didn't  see,'  'did  you  gave  me?'  for  'did 
you  give  me?'  Active  and  passive  forms  are  sometimes 
confused,  as  when  M.  said  '  not  yike  being  picking  up '  for 
'  not  like  being  picked  up,'  etc.  It  is  curious  to  note  the 
different  lines  of  imitative  construction  followed  out  in  these 
cases. 

One  thing  seems  clear  here :  the  child's  instinct  is  to 

1  The  same  double  tendency  from  weak  to  strong  forms  and  vice 
versa  is  seen  in  the  list  of  transformed  past  participles  given  by  Preyer, 
op.  cit.,  p.  360. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  177 

simplify  our  forms,  to  get  rid  of  irregularities.  This  is 
strikingly  illustrated  in  the  use  of  the  heterogeneous 
assemblage  of  forms  known  as  the  verb  'to  be'.  It  is 
really  hard  on  a  child  to  expect  him  to  answer  the  question, 
'  Are  you  good  now? '  by  saying,  '  Yes,  I  am  '.  He  says,  of 
course,  'Yes,  I  are'.  Perhaps  the  poor  verb  'to  be'  has 
suffered  every  kind  of  violence  at  the  hands  of  children.1 
Thus  the  child  M.  used  the  form  'bed'  for  'was'.  Pro- 
fessor Max  M  tiller  somewhere  says  that  children  are  the 
purifiers  of  language.  Would  it  not  be  well  if  they  could 
become  its  simplifiers  also,  and  give  us  in  place  of  this  con- 
geries of  unrelated  sounds  one  good  decent  verb-form  ? 

Other  quaint  transformations  occur  when  the  child 
begins  to  combine  words,  as  when  M.  joining  adverb  to 
verb  invented  the  form  of  past  tense  '  fall  downed '  for 
'  fell  down  '.  Another  queer  form  is  '  Am't  I  ? '  used  for 
'am  I  not?'  after  the  pattern  of  'aren't  we?'  An  even 
finer  linguistic  stroke  than  this,  is  '  Bettern't  you  ? '  for 
'  Had  you  not  better  ? '  where  the  child  was  evidently 
trying  to  get  in  the  form  '  hadn't  you,'  along  with  the 
awkward  '  better,'  which  seemed  to  belong  to  the  '  had,' 
and  solved  the  problem  by  treating  '  better '  as  the  verb, 
and  dropping  '  had  '  altogether. 

A  study  of  these  solecisms,  which  are  nearly  always 
amusing,  and  sometimes  daintily  pretty,  is  useful  to  mothers 
and  young  teachers  by  way  of  showing  how  much  hard 
work,  how  much  of  real  conjectural  inference,  enters  into 
children's  essays  in  talking.  We  ought  not  to  wonder 
that  they  now  and  again  slip  ;  rather  ought  we  to  wonder 
that,  with  all  the  intricacies  and  pitfalls  of  our  language 
— this  applies  of  course  with  especial  force  to  the  motley 
irregular  English  tongue — they  slip  so  rarely.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  the  latter  and  more  'correct'  talk — which  is  correct 

1  Cf.  Prayer's  account  of  a  German  child's  liberties  with  the 
same  verb,  where  we  find  '  gebisst,'  'binnst,'  and  other  odd  forms, 
op.  «/.,  p.  438. 

12 


1/8  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

just  because  the  child  has  stored  up  a  good  stock  of  par- 
ticular word-forms,  and  consequently  has  a  much  wider 
range  of  pure  uninventive  imitation — is  less  admirable  than 
the  early  inventive  imitation  ;  for  this  last  not  only  has  the 
quality  of  originality,  but  shows  the  germ  of  a  truly  gram- 
matical feeling  for  the  general  types  or  norms  erf  the 
language. 

The  English  child  is  not  much  troubled  by  inflections 
of  substantives.  The  pronouns,  however,  as  intelligent 
mothers  know,  are  apt  to  cause  much  heart-burning  to  the 
little  linguist.  The  mastery  of  '  I '  and  'you,'  '  me,'  mine,' 
etc.,  forms  an  epoch  in  the  development  of  the  linguistic 
faculty  and  of  the  power  of  thought  which  is  so  closely 
correlated  with  this.  Hence  it  will  repay  a  brief  in- 
spection. 

As  is  well  known,  children  begin  by  speaking  of  them- 
selves and  of  those  whom  they  address  by  names,  as  when 
they  say,  '  Baby  good,'  '  Mamma  come'.  This  is  sometimes 
described  as  speaking  "  in  the  third  person,"  yet  this  is  not 
quite  accurate,  seeing  that  there  is  as  yet  no  distinction  of 
person  at  all  in  the  child's  language. 

The  first  use  of  '  I  '  and  '  you '  between  two  and 
three  years  is  apt  to  be  erroneous.  The  child  proceeds 
imitatively  to  use  'I,'  'me,'  'my'  for  'you'  and  'your'. 
Thus  one  child  said,  'What  I'm  going  to  do,'  for, 
'What  are  you  going  to  do?'  In  this  case,  it  is  plain, 
there  is  no  clear  grasp  of  what  we  mean  by  subject,  or 
of  the  exact  relation  of  this  subject  to  the  person  he  is 
addressing. 

Yet  along  with  this  mechanical  repetition  of  the 
pronominal  forms  we  see  the  beginnings  of  an  intelli- 
gent use  of  them.  So  far  as  I  can  ascertain  most 
children  begin  to  say  '  me '  or  '  my '  before  they  say 
'  you '.  Yet  I  have  met  with  one  or  two  apparent  ex- 
ceptions to  this  rule.  Thus  the  boy  C.  certainly  seemed 
to  get  hold  of  the  form  of  the  second  person  before  that 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  179 

of  the  first,  and  the  priority  of  '  you '  is  attested  in  another 
case  sent  to  me.  It  is  desirable  to  get  more  observations 
on  this  point. 

To  determine  the  exact  date  at  which  an  intelligent  use 
of  the  first  person  appears,  is  much  less  easy  than  it  looks. 
The  '  I  '  is  apt  to  appear  momentarily  and  then  disap- 
pear, as  when  M.  at  the  age  of  nineteen  months  three 
weeks  was  observed  to  say  '  I  did '  once,  though  she  did 
not  use  '  I  '  again  until  some  time  afterwards.  Allowing 
for  these  difficulties  it  may  be  said  with  some  degree  of 
confidence  that  the  great  transition  from  '  baby  'to  '  I '  is 
wont  to  take  place  in  favourable  cases  early  in  the  first  half 
of  the  third  year.  Thus  among  the  dates  assigned  by  differ- 
ent observers  I  find,  twenty-four  months,  twenty-five  months 
(cases  given  by  Preyer),  between  twenty-five  and  twenty- 
six  (Pollock),  twenty-seven  months  (the  boy  C.).  A  lady 
friend  tells  me  that  her  boy  began  to  use  '  I  '  at  twenty- 
four  months.  In  the  case  of  a  certain  number  of  precocious 
children  this  point  is  attained  at  an  earlier  date.  Thus 
Preyer  quotes  a  case  of  a  child  speaking  in  the  first  person 
at  twenty  months.  Schultze  gives  a  case  at  nineteen 
months.  A  friend  of  mine,  a  Professor  of  English  Litera- 
ture, whose  boy  showed  great  precocity  in  sentence-build- 
ing, reports  that  he  used  the  forms  '  me  '  and  '  I '  within  the 
sixteenth  month.  Preyer's  boy,  on  the  other  hand,  who 
was  evidently  somewhat  slow  in  lingual  development,  first 
used  the  form  of  the  first  person  '  to  me '  (mir)  at  the  age 
of  twenty-nine  months. 

The  precise  way  in  which  these  pronominal  forms  first 
appear  is  very  curious.  Many  children  use  'me'  before  T. 
Preyer's  boy  appears  to  have  first  used  the  form  '  to  me ' 
(mir).  '  My '  too  is  apt  to  appear  among  the  earliest  forms. 
In  such  different  ways  does  the  child  pass  to  the  new  and 
difficult  region  of  pronominal  speech. 

The  meaning  of  this  transition  has  given  rise  to  much 
discussion.  It  is  plain,  to  begin  with,  that  a  child  cannot 


180  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

acquire  these  forms  as  he  acquires  the  name  '  papa,r 
'  nurse,'  by  a  direct  and  comparatively  mechanical  mode 
of  imitation.  When  he  does  imitate  in  this  fashion  he 
produces,  as  we  have  seen,  the  absurdity  of  speaking  of 
himself  as  '  you '.  Hence  during  the  first  year  or  so  of 
speech  he  makes  no  use  of  these  forms.  He  speaks  of 
himself  as  '  baby  '  or  some  equivalent  name,  others  coming 
down  to  his  level  and  setting  him  the  example. 

The  transition  seems  to  be  due  in  part,  as  I  have 
elsewhere  pointed  out,  to  a  growing  self-consciousness,  to  a 
clearer  singling  out  of  the  ego  or  self  as  the  centre  of 
thought  and  activity,  and  the  understanding  of  the  other 
'persons'  in  relation  to  this  centre.  Not  that  self-con- 
sciousness begins  with  the  use  of  '  I '.  The  child  has  no 
doubt  a  rudimentary  self-consciousness  when  he  talks 
about  himself  as  about  another  object :  yet  the  use  of  the 
forms  '  I,'  '  me,'  may  be  taken  to  mark  the  greater  precision 
of  the  idea  of 'self  as  not  merely  a  bodily  object  and 
nameable  just  like  other  sensible  things,  but  as  something 
distinct  from  and  opposed  to  all  objects  of  sense,  as  what 
we  call  the  '  subject '  or  ego. 

While,  however,  we  may  set  down  this  exchange  of  the 
proper  name  for  the  forms  '  I '  and  '  me '  as  due  to  the 
spontaneous  growth  of  the  child's  intelligence,  it  is  possible 
that  education  exerts  its  influence  too.  It  is  conjectur- 
able  that  as  a  child's  intelligence  grows,  others  in  speaking 
to  him  tend  unknowingly  to  introduce  the  forms  '  I  '  and 
'  you '  more  frequently.  Yet  I  am  disposed  to  think  that 
the  child  commonly  takes  the  lead  here.  However  this 
be,  it  is  clear  that  growing  intelligence,  involving  greater 
interest  in  others'  words,  will  lead  to  a  closer  attention  to 
these  pronominal  forms  as  employed  by  others.  In  this 
way  the  environment  works  on  the  growing  mind  of  the 
child,  stimulating  it  to  direct  its  thoughts  to  these  subtle 
relations  of  the  '  me  and  not  me,'  '  mine  and  thine '.  The 
more  intelligent  the  environment  the  greater  will  be  the 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  l8l 

stimulating  influence  :  hence,  in  part  at  least,  the  difference 
of  age  when  the  new  style  of  speech  is  attained.1 

The  acquirement  of  these  pronominal  forms  is  a  slow 
and  irksome  business.  At  first  they  are  introduced  hesi- 
tatingly, and  alongside  of  the  proper  name  ;  the  child, 
for  example,  saying  sometimes,  '  Baby  '  or  '  Ilda,'  some- 
times ' I '  or  'me'.  In  some  cases,  again,  the  two  forms  are 
used  at  the  same  time  in  apposition,  as  in  the  delightful 
form  not  unknown  in  older  folk's  language,  '  Hilda,  my 
book  '.  The  forms  '  I '  and  '  me  '  are,  moreover,  confined 
at  first  to  a  few  expressions,  as  '  I  am,'  '  I  went,'  and  so 
forth.  The  dropping  of  the  old  forms,  as  may  be  seen  by 
a  glance  at  the  notes  on  the  child  C,  and  at  Preyer's 
methodical  diary,  is  a  gradual  process. 

Quaint  solecisms  mark  the  first  stages  of  the  use  of 
these  pronouns.  As  in  the  case  of  the  earlier  use  of 
substantives,  one  and  the  same  form  will  be  used  econo- 
mically for  a  variety  of  meanings,  as  when  '  me '  was  by 
the  boy  C.  used  to  do  duty  for  '  mine  '  also,  and  '  us '  for 
'  ours  '.  Here  it  is  probable  there  is  a  lack  of  perfect  dis- 
crimination. The  connexion  between  the  self  and  its  be- 
longings is  for  all  of  us  of  the  closest.  When  a  child  of  two, 
who  was  about  to  be  deprived  of  her  doll,  shouted,  '  Me, 
me !  '  may  we  not  suppose  that  the  doll  was  taken  up  into 
the  inner  circle  of  the  self  ? 2  Sometimes  in  this  enrichment 
of  the  vocabulary  by  pronouns  new  and  delightful  forms 
are  struck  off,  as  when  the  little  experimenter  invents  the 
possessive  form  '  she's  '. 

The  perfect  unfettered  use  of  these  puzzling  forms 
comes  much  later.  Preyer  quotes  a  case  in  which  a  child 

1  Preyer  (op.  cit.,  Cap.  22}  seems  to  argue  that  children  have  a 
clear  self-consciousness  before  they  attempt  to  use  the  forms  '  I,' 
etc. ;  and  that  the  acquisition  of  the  latter  is  due  to  imitation.     But 
he   does   not   show   why   this   imitation   should    begin  to   work  so 
powerfully  at  a  particular  period  of  linguistic  development. 

2  Compare  above,  p.  43. 


1 82  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

Olga,  aged  four  years,  would  say,  '  She  has  made  me  wet/ 
meaning  that  she  herself  had  done  it.  But  this  perhaps 
points  to  that  tendency  to  split  up  the  self  into  a  number 
of  personalities,  to  which  reference  was  made  in  an  earlier 
essay. 

The  third  year,  which  witnesses  the  important  addition 
of  the  pronouns,  sees  other  refinements  introduced.  Thus 
the  definite  article  was  introduced  in  the  case  of  Preyer's 
boy  in  the  twenty-eighth  month,  in  that  of  an  English  boy 
at  the  age  of  two  years  eight  months.  Prepositions  are 
introduced  about  the  same  time.  In  this  way  childish 
talk  begins  to  lose  its  primitive  disjointed  character,  and 
to  grow  into  an  articulated  structure.1  Yet  the  perfect 
mastery  of  these  takes  time.  A  feeling  for  analogy  easily 
leads  the  little  explorer  astray  at  first,  as  when  the  child 
M.  said  '  far  to  '  after  the  model  '  near  to  '. 

Through  this  whole  period  of  language-learning  the 
child  continues  to  show  his  originality,  his  inventiveness. 
He  is  rarely  at  a  loss,  and  though  the  gaps  in  his  verbal 
acquisitions  are  great  he  is  very  skilful  in  filling  them  up. 
If,  for  example,  our  bright  little  linguist  M.,  at  the  age  of 
one  year  eight  and  a  half  months,  after  being  jumped  by 
her  father,  wants  him  to  jump  her  mother  also,  she  says,  in 
default  of  the  word  'jump,'  "Make  mamma  high".  A  boy 
of  twenty-seven  months  ingeniously  said,  '  It  rains  off/  for 
'The  rain  has  left  off'.  Forms  are  sometimes  combined, 
as  when  a  boy  of  three  years  three  months  used  '  my  lone,' 
'  your  lone,'  for  '  me  alone  '  or  '  by  myself,'  '  you  alone'  or 
'  by  yourself '.  Another  girl,  two  years  ten  months,  said,. 
'  No  two  'tatoes  left,'  meaning  '  only  one  potato  is  left '. 
Pleonasms  occur  in  abundance,  as  when  a  boy  of  two- 
would  say,  '  Another  one  bicca  (biscuit),'  and,  better  still, 
'  another  more '. 

1  For  a  fuller  account  of  this  progress,  the  reader  cannot  do- 
better  than  consult  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  Cap.  20  and  21. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  183 

Getting  at  our  Meanings, 

There  is  one  part  of  this  child's  work  of  learning  our 
language  of  which  I  have  said  hardly  anything,  viz.,  the 
divining  of  the  verbal  content,  of  the  meaning  we  put  or  try 
to  put  into  our  words.  A  brief  reference  to  this  may  well 
bring  this  study  of  childish  linguistics  to  a  close. 

The  least  attention  to  a  child  in  the  act  of  language- 
learning  will  show  how  much  of  downright  hard  work  goes 
to  the  understanding  of  language.  If  we  are  to  judge  by 
the  effort  required  we  might  say  that  the  child  does  as 
much  in  deciphering  his  mother-tongue  as  an  Oriental 
scholar  in  deciphering  a  system  of  hieroglyphics.  Just  think, 
for  example,  how  many  careful  comparisons  the  small  child- 
brain  has  to  carry  out,  comparisons  of  the  several  uses  of 
the  word  by  others  in  varying  circumstances,  before  he  can 
get  anything  approaching  to  a  clear  idea,  answering  even 
to  such  seemingly  simple  words  as  '  clean/  'old'  or  'clever'. 
The  way  in  which  inquiring  children  plague  us  with  ques- 
tions of  the  form, '  What  does  such  and  such  a  word  mean  ?' 
sufficiently  shows  how  much  thought-activity  goes  in  the 
trying  to  get  at  meanings.  This  difficulty,  moreover, 
persists,  reappearing  in  new  forms  as  the  child  pushes  his 
way  onwards  into  the  more  tangled  tracts  of  the  lingual 
terrain.  It  is  felt,  and  felt  keenly,  too,  when  most  of  the 
torments  of  articulation  are  over  and  forgotten.  Many  of 
us  can  remember  how  certain  words  haunted  us  as  uncanny 
forms  into  the  nature  of  which  we  tried  hard,  but  in  vain,  to 
penetrate. 

Owing  to  these  difficulties  the  little  learner  is  always 
drifting  into  misunderstanding  of  words.  Such  misappre- 
hensions will  arise  in  a  passive  way  by  the  mere  play  of 
association  in  attaching  the  word  especially  to  some  striking 
feature  or  circumstance  which  is  apt  to  present  itself  when  the 
word  is  used  in  the  child's  hearing.  In  this  way,  for  ex- 
ample, general  terms  may  become  terribly  restricted  in  range 
by  the  incorporation  of  accidentals  into  their  meaning,  as. 


1 84  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

when  a  Sunday  school  scholar  rendered  the  story  of  the 
good  Samaritan  by  saying  that  a  gentleman  came  by  and 
poured  some  paraffin  (i.e.,  oil)  over  the  poor  man.  A  word 
may  have  its  meaning  funnily  transformed  by  such  associa- 
tive suggestions,  as  when  a  little  girl,  being  told  that  a 
thing  was  a  secret,  remarked,  '  Well,  mamma,  'ou  (you) 
can  whisper  it  in  my  ear'.  As  this  example  shows,  a 
child  in  his  '  concreting '  fashion  tries  to  get  sensible 
realities  out  of  our  names.  A  mask  was  called  by  a  boy  of 
six  a  '  grimace,'  this  abstract  name  standing  to  his  mind  for 
the  grinning  face.  A  like  tendency  shows  itself  in  the 
following  quaint  story.  A  boy  and  a  girl,  twins,  had  been 
dressed  alike.  Later  on  the  boy  was  put  into  a  '  suit '.  A 
lady  asked  the  girl  about  this  time  whether  they  were  not 
the  twins,  when  she  replied :  '  No,  we  used  to  be '.  '  Twin  ' 
was  inseparably  associated  in  her  mind  with  the  similarity 
in  dress.  A  somewhat  similar  effect  of  association  of  ideas 
is  seen  in  the  quaint  request  of  the  little  girl  M.  that  her 
mamma  should  '  smell  '  the  pudding  and  make  it  cool. 
The  action  of  bringing  the  face  near  an  object  yet  so  as 
not  to  touch  it  was  associated  with  smelling,  as  in  the 
little  girl  who,  according  to  Mr.  Punch,  had  her  sense  of 
propriety  shocked  by  some  irreverent  person  who  did  not 
"  smell  his  hat  "  when  he  took  his  seat  in  church.  Moral 
expressions  get  misunderstood  in  much  the  same  manner. 
A  little  girl  of  three  and  a  half  years,  pretending  that  her 
mother  was  her  little  girl,  said  :  '  You  mustn't  do  anything 
on  purpose'.  The  usual  verbal  context  of  this  highly- 
respectable  phrase  (e.g.,  '  You  did  it  on  purpose ')  had  in 
the  child's  mind  given  it  a  naughty  meaning. 

With  these  losings  of  the  verbal  road  through  associa- 
tive by-paths  may  be  taken  the  host  of  misapprehensions 
into  which  children  are  apt  to  fall  through  the  ambiguities 
of  our  words  and  expressions,  and  our  short  and  elliptical 
modes  of  speaking.  Thus  an  American  child,  noting  that 
children  were  '  half  price '  at  a  certain  show,  wanted  his 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  185 

mother  to  get  a  baby  now  that  they  were  cheap.1  With 
this  may  be  compared  the  following  :  Jean  Ingelow  tells 
us  she  can  well  remember  how  sad  she  was  made  by  her 
father  telling  her  one  day  after  dancing  her  on  his  knee 
that  he  must  put  her  down  as  he  '  had  a  bone  in  his  leg'.2 
Much  misapprehension  arises,  too,  from  our  figurative  use 
of  language,  which  the  little  listener  is  apt  to  interpret  in  a 
very  literal  way.  It  would  be  worth  knowing  what  odd 
renderings  the  child-brain  has  given  to  such  expressions  as 
*an  upright  man,'  '  a  fish  out  of  water,'  and  the  like. 

In  addition  to  these  comparatively  passive  misapprehen- 
sions there  are  others  which  are  the  outcome  of  an  intellectual 
effort,  the  endeavour  to  penetrate  into  the  mystery  of  some 
new  and  puzzling  words  or  expression.  Many  of  us  have 
had  our  special  horror,  our  bete  noire  among  words,  which 
tormented  us  for  months  and  years.  I  remember  how 
I  was  plagued  by  the  word  '  wean,'  the  explanation  of  which 
was  very  properly,  no  doubt,  denied  me  by  the  authorities, 
and  by  what  quaint  fancies  I  tried  to  fill  in  a  meaning. 

As  with  words,  so  with  whole  expressions  and  sayings. 
It  was  a  natural  movement  of  childish  thought  when  a  little 
school-girl  answered  the  question  of  the  Inspector,  '  What 
is  an  average  ?  '  by  saying  '  What  the  hen  lays  eggs  on  '. 
She  had  heard  her  mother  say,  "  The  hen  lays  so  many  eggs 
4  on  the  average '  every  week,"  and  had  no  doubt  imagined 
a  little  myth  about  this  '  average  '.  Again,  most  of  us  know 
what  queer  renderings  the  child-mind  has  given  to  Scripture 
language.  Mr.  James  Payn  tells  us  that  he  knew  a  boy 
who  for  years  substituted  for  the  words,  '  Hallowed  be  thy 
name,'  '  Harold  be  thy  name  '.a  In  this  and  similar  cases  it 
is  not,  as  might  be  supposed,  defective  hearing — children 
hear  words  as  a  rule  with  great  exactness — it  is  the  impulse 

1  Worcester  Collection,  p.  21. 

a  C/.  the  account  Goltz  gives  of  the  anxiety  he  felt  as  a  child  on 
hearing  that  his  uvula  (zapfen)  had  '  fallen  down,'  op.  cit.,  p.  261. 
3  In  the  Illustrated  London  News,  3oth  June,  1894. 


1 86  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

to  give  a  familiar  and  significant  rendering  to  what  is  strange 
and  meaningless.1  A  friend  of  mine  when  a  boy  was  ac- 
customed on  hearing  the  passage,  '  If  I  say  peradventure  the 
darkness  shall  cover  me,"  etc.,  to  insert  a  pause  after  '  per- 
adventure,' apprehending  the  passage  in  this  wise:  "If  I  say 
'  Peradventure!' — the  darkness,"  etc.  In  this  way  he  turned 
the  mysterious  '  peradventure  '  into  a  mystic  '  open  sesame,' 
and  added  a  thrilling  touch  of  magic  to  the  passage.  My 
friend's  daughter  tells  me  that  on  hearing  the  passage,  "I  ... 
visit  the  sins  of  the  fathers  upon  the  children  unto  the  third 
and  fourth  generation,  .  .  .  and  show  mercy  unto  thousands," 
she  construed  the  strange  word  'generation'  to  mean  an  im- 
mense number  like  '  billion,'  and  was  thus  led  to  trouble 
herself  about  God's  seeming  to  be  more  cruel  than  kind. 2 

In  some  cases,  too,  where  the  language  is  simple  enough 
a  child's  brain  will  find  our  meaning  unsuitable  and  follow 
a  line  of  interpretation  of  its  own.  Mr.  Canton  relates  that 
his  little  heroine,  who  knew  the  lines  in  Strumpelpeter — 

The  doctor  came  and  shook  his  head, 
And  gave  him  nasty  physic  too — 

was  told  that  she  would  catch  a  cold,  and  that  she  at  once 
replied,  "And  will  the  doctor  come  and  shook  my  head  ?  "  3 
It  was  so  much  more  natural  to  suppose  that  when  the 
doctor  came  and  did  something  this  was  carried  out  on  the 
person  of  the  patient. 

There  is  nothing  more  instructive  in  this  connexion 
than  the  talk  of  children  among  themselves  about  words. 
They  build  up  quaint  speculations  about  meanings,  and 
try  their  hand  bravely  at  definitions.  Here  is  an  example  : 

1  Of  course  defective  auditory  apprehension  may  assist  in  these 
cases.     Goltz  gives  an  example  from  his  own  childhood.     He  took 
the  words  "  Namen  nennen  Dich  nicht  "  to  be  "  Namen  nenne  Dich 
nicht,"  and  was  sorely  puzzled  at  the  idea  of  bidding  a  name  not  ta 
name  itself. 

2  Psalm  cxxxix.  and  Second  Commandment,  Prayer-book  version. 

3  The  Invisible  Playmate,  p.  35. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  l8/ 

A  boy  of  five  was  instructing  his  comrade  as  to  the  puzzling 
word  '  home-sick  '.  He  did  it  in  quite  a  scientific  fashion. 
"  It's  like  sea-sick,  you  know :  you  are  sea-sick  when  you 
are  sick  at  sea,  and  so  you're  home-sick  when  you're  sick 
at  home  ". 

There  is  something  of  this  same  desire  to  get  behind 
words  in  children's  word-play,  as  we  call  it,  their  discovery 
of  odd  affinities  in  verbal  sounds,  and  their  punning.  Though 
no  doubt  this  contains  a  genuine  element  of  childish 
fun,  it  betokens  a  more  serious  trait  also,  an  interest  in 
word-sounds  as  such,  and  a  curiosity  about  their  origin 
and  purpose.  It  is  difficult  for  grown-up  people  to  go 
back  in  thought  to  the  attitude  of  the  child-mind  towards 
verbal  sounds.  Just  as  children  show  '  the  innocence  of 
the  eye '  in  seeing  the  colours  of  objects  as  they  are  and 
not  as  our  habits  of  interpretation  tend  to  make  them,  so 
they  show  an  innocence  of  the  ear,  catching  the  intrinsic 
sensuous  qualities  of  a  word  or  a  group  of  words,  in  a  way 
which  has  become  impossible  for  us. 

This  half-playful,  half-serious  scrutiny  of  word-sounds 
leads  to  the  attempt  to  find  by  analysis  and  analogy  a 
familiar  meaning  in  strange  words.  For  example,  a  little 
boy  about  four  years  old  heard  his  mother  speak  of  nurse's 
neuralgia,  from  which  she  had  been  suffering  for  some  time. 
He  thereupon  exclaimed,  '  I  don't  think  it's  new  ralgia,  I 
call  it  old  ralgia '.  A  child  called  his  doll  '  Shakespeare ' 
because  its  spear-like  legs  could  be  shaken.  Another  boy 
of  three  explained  '  gaiters '  as  things  '  to  go  out  of  the  gate 
with  '.  Another  said  that  the  '  Master '  which  he  prefixed 
to  his  name  meant  that  he  was  master  of  his  dog.  A  little 
girl  in  her  third  year  called  'anchovies1  ' ham-chovies,' 
'merrnaid'  'worm-maid,'  'whirlwind'  'world-wind,'  'gnomes' 
'  no-mans '  (un-menschen),  taking  pleasure  apparently  in 
bringing  some  familiar  element — even  when  this  seems 
to  other  ears  at  least  not  very  explanatory — into  the 
strange  jumble  of  word-sound  that  surrounded  her.  A  child 


1 88  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

may  know  that  he  is  '  fooling '  in  such  cases,  yet  the  word- 
play brings  a  certain  satisfaction,  which  is  at  least  akin  to 
the  pleasure  of  the  older  linguist. 

This  quasi-punning  transformation  of  words  is  curiously 
like  what  may  be  called  folk-etymology,  where  a  foreign 
word  is  altered  by  a  people  so  as  to  be  made  to  appear 
significant  and  suitable  for  its  purpose,  as  in  the  oft-quoted 
forms  '  sparrow  grass '  (asparagus)  and  '  cray-fish '  (from  the 
French  ecrevisse,  cf.  the  O.  H.  German  Krebiz),  where  the 
attempt  to  suit  the  form  to  the  thing  is  still  more  apparent.1 
When,  for  example,  a  boy  calls  a  holiday  a  '  hollorday,' 
because  it  is  a  day  '  to  holloa  in,'  we  may  say  that  he  is 
reflecting  the  process  by  which  adults  try  to  put  meaning 
into  strange  words,  as  when  a  cabman  I  overheard  a  few 
days  ago  spoke  about  putting  down  asphalt  (for  'asphalt'). 
Some  children  carry  out  such  transformation  and  invention 
of  derivation  on  a  large  scale,  often  resorting  to  pretty  myths, 
as  when  the  butterflies  are  said  to  make  butter,  or  to  eat 
butter,  grasshoppers  to  give  grass,  honeysuckles  to  yield 
all  the  honey,  and  so  forth.2 

A  child  will  even  go  further,  and,  prying  into  the  forms 
of  gender,  invent  explanatory  myths  in  which  words  are 
personified  and  sexualised.  Thus  a  little  boy  of  five  years 
and  three  months  who  had  learned  German  and  Italian  as 
well  as  English  was  much  troubled  about  the  gender  of  the 
sun  and  moon.  So  he  set  about  myth-making  on  this 
wise  :  "  I  suppose  people3  think  the  sun  is  the  husband,  the 
moon  is  the  wife,  and  all  the  stars  the  little  children,  and 
Jupiter  the  maid  ".  A  German  girl  of  six  was  thus  ad- 
dressed by  her  teacher:  "'  Der'  ist  mannlich  ;  Was  sind 
'Die'  und  'Das'?"  To  which  she  replied  prettily  :  "  Die  ist 

1  The  other  form  of  the  word,  '  craw-fish,'  seems  a  still  more  in- 
genious example  of  folk-etymology. 

2  These  last  are  taken  from  a  good  list  of  children's  punnings  in 
Dr.  Stanley  Hall's  article,  "The  Contents  of  Children's  Minds". 

3  That  is,  I  take  it,  the  majority,  viz.,  Italians  and  English. 


THE   LITTLE   LINGUIST.  189 

damlich  (i.e.,  'ladyish')  und  das  ist  kindlich".  The  tendency 
to  attribute  differences  of  sex  and  age  to  names  observable 
in  this  last  is  seen  in  other  ways.  An  Italian  child  asked 
why  'barba'  (beard)  was  not  called  'barbo'.  With  this  may 
be  compared  the  pretty  myth  of  another  Italian  child  that 
'  barca '  (boat)  was  the  little  girl  of  'barcainolo'  (boatman).1 

One  other  characteristic  feature  in  the  child's  attitude 
towards  words  must  be  touched  on,  because  it  looks  like  the 
opposite  of  the  impulse  to  tamper  with  words  just  dealt 
with.  A  child  is  a  great  stickler  for  accuracy  in  the 
repetition  of  all  familiar  word-forms.  The  zeal  of  a  child 
in  correcting  others'  language,  and  the  comical  errors  he 
will  now  and  again  fall  into  in  exercising  his  pedagogic 
function,  are  well  known  to  parents.  Sometimes  he  shows 
himself  the  most  absurd  of  pedants.  '  Shall  I  read  to  you 
out  of  this  book,  baby  ?  '  asked  a  mother  of  her  boy,  about 
two  and  a  half  years  old.  '  No,'  replied  the  infant,  '  not 
out  of  dot  book,  but  somepy  inside  of  it.'  The  same  little 
stickler  for  verbal  accuracy,  when  his  nurse  asked  him, '  Are 
you  going  to  build  your  bricks,  baby  ? '  replied  solemnly, 
'  We  don't  build  bricks,  we  make  them  and  then  build  with 
them'.  In  the  notes  on  the  boy  C.  we  find  an  example  of 
how  jealously  the  child-mind  insists  on  the  ipsissima  verba 
in  the  recounting  of  his  familiar  stories. 

Are  these  little  sticklers  for  verbal  correctness,  who  object 
to  everything  figurative  in  our  language,  who,  when  they 
learn  that  a  person  or  an  animal  has  '  lost  his  head,'  take 
the  expression  literally,  and  who  love  nothing  better  than 
tying  us  down  to  literal  exactness,  themselves  given  to 
'  word-play '  and  verbal  myth-making,  or  have  we  here  to 
do  with  two  varieties  of  childish  mind  ?  My  observations 
do  not  enable  me  to  pronounce  on  this  point. 

I  have  in  this  essay  confined  myself  to  some  of  the 
more  common  and  elementary  features  of  the  child's 

1  Both  of  these  are  given  by  Paola  Lombroso  in  the  work  already 
quoted. 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

linguistic  experience.  Others  present  themselves  when  the 
reading  stage  is  reached,  and  the  new  strange  stupid-looking 
word-symbol  on  the  printed  page  has  to  do  duty  for  the 
living  sound,  which  for  the  child,  as  we  have  seen,  seems  to 
belong  to  the  object  and  to  share  in  its  life.  But  this  sub- 
ject, tempting  as  it  is,  must  be  left.  And  the  same  must  be 
said  of  those  special  difficulties  and  problems  which  arise 
for  the  child-mind  when  two  or  more  languages  are  spoken. 
This  is  a  branch  of  child-linguistics  which,  so  far  as  I  know, 
has  never  been  explored. 


VI. 

SUBJECT  TO   FEAR. 
Children's  Sensibility. 

IN  passing  from  a  study  of  children's  ideas  to  an  investiga- 
tion of  their  feelings,  we  seem  to  encounter  quite  another 
kind  of  problem.  A  child  has  the  germs  of  ideas  long 
before  he  can  give  them  clear  articulate  expression  ;  and, 
as  we  have  seen,  he  has  at  first  to  tax  his  ingenuity  in 
order  to  convey  by  intelligible  signs  the  thoughts  which 
arise  in  his  mind.  For  the  manifestation  of  his  feelings  of 
pleasure  and  pain,  on  the  other  hand,  nature  has  endowed 
him  with  adequate  expression.  The  states  of  infantile 
discontent  and  content,  misery  and  gladness,  pronounce 
themselves  with  a  clearness  and  an  emphasis  which  leave 
no  room  for  misunderstanding. 

This  full  frank  manifestation  of  feeling  holds  good 
more  especially  of  those  states  of  bodily  comfort  and  dis- 
comfort which  make  up  the  first  rude  experiences  of  life. 
It  is  necessary  for  the  child's  preservation  that  he  should 
be  able  to  announce  by  clear  signals  the  oncoming  of  his 
cravings  and  of  his  sufferings,  and  we  all  know  how  well 
nature  has  provided  for  this  necessity.  Hence  the  fulness 
with  which  infant  psychology  has  dealt  with  this  first 
chapter  of  the  life  of  feeling.  Preyer,  for  example,  gives 
a  full  and  almost  exhaustive  epitome  of  the  various  shades 
of  infantile  pleasure  and  pain  which  grow  out  of  this  life 
of  sense  and  appetite,  and  has  carefully  described  their 
physiological  accompaniments  and  their  signatures.1 

1  Op.  cit.,  Cap.  6  and  13. 


1Q2  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

When  we  pass  from  these  elementary  forms  of  pleasure 
and  pain  to  the  rudiments  of  emotion  proper,  as  the 
miseries  of  fear,  the  sorrows  and  joys  of  the  affections, 
we  have  still,  no  doubt,  to  do  with  a  mode  of  manifestation 
which,  on  the  whole,  is  direct  and  unreserved  to  a  gratifying 
extent.  A  child  of  three  is  delightfully  incapable  of  the 
skilful  repressions,  and  the  yet  more  skilful  simulations 
of  emotion  which  are  easy  to  the  adult.1  Yet  frank  and 
transparent  as  is  the  first  instinctive  utterance  of  feeling, 
it  is  apt  to  get  checked  at  an  early  date,  giving  place 
to  a  certain  reserve.  So  that,  as  we  know  from  published 
reminiscences  of  childhood,  a  child  of  six  will  have  learnt 
to  hide  some  of  his  deepest  feelings  from  unsympathetic 
eyes. 

This  shyness  of  the  young  heart,  face  to  face  with  old 
and  strange  ways  of  feeling,  exposed  to  ridicule  if  not  to 
something  worse,  makes  the  problem  of  registering  the 
pulsations  of  its  emotions  more  difficult  than  it  at  first  seems. 
As  a  matter  of  fact  we  are  still  far  from  knowing  the  precise 
range  and  depth  of  children's  feelings.  This  is  seen  plainly- 
enough  in  the  quite  opposite  views  which  are  entertained  of 
childish  sensibility,  some  describing  it  as  restricted  and 
obtuse,  others  as  morbidly  excessive.  Such  diversity  of 
view  may  no  doubt  arise  from  differences  in  the  fields  of 
observation,  since,  as  we  know,  children  differ  hardly  less 
than  adults  perhaps  in  breadth  and  fineness  of  emotional 
susceptibility.  Yet  I  think  that  this  contrariety  of  view 
points  further  to  the  conclusion  that  we  are  still  far  from 
sounding  with  finely  measuring  scientific  apparatus  the 
currents  of  childish  emotion. 

It  seems,  then,  to  be  worth  while  to  look  further  into 
the  matter  in  the  hope  of  gaining  a  deeper  and  fuller  insight, 

1  This  does  not  apply  to  older  children.  As  Tolstoi's  book, 
Childhood,  Boyhood  and  Youth,  tells  us,  a  boy  of  twelve  may  be  much 
given  to  straining  after  feelings  which  he  thinks  he  ought  to  ex- 
perience. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  193 

and  as  a  step  in  this  direction  I  propose  to  inquire  into 
the  various  forms  and  the  causes  of  one  of  the  best 
marked  and  most  characteristic  of  children's  feelings — 
namely,  fear. 

That  fear  is  one  of  the  characteristic  feelings  of  the 
child  needs  no  proving.  It  seems  to  belong  to  these  wee, 
weakly  things,  brought  face  to  face  with  a  new  strange 
world,  to  tremble.  They  are  naturally  timid,  as  all  that  is 
weak  and  ignorant  in  nature  is  apt  to  be  timid. 

I  have  said  that  fear  is  well  marked  in  the  child.  Yet, 
though  it  is  true  that  fully  developed  fear  or  terror  shows 
itself  by  unmistakable  signs,  there  are  many  cases  where 
it  is  difficult  to  say  whether  the  child  is  the  subject  of  this 
feeling.  Thus  it  is  doubtful  whether  the  tremblings  and 
disturbances  of  respiration  which  are  said  to  betray  fear  in 
the  new-born  infant  are  a  full  expression  of  this  state.1 
Again,  the  reflex  movement  of  a  start  on  hearing  a  sound 
hardly  amounts  to  the  full  reaction  of  fear,  though  it  is  akin 
to  it.2  A  child  may,  further,  show  a  sort  of  aesthetic  dislike 
for  an  ugly  form  or  sound,  turning  away  in  evident  aversion, 
and  yet  not  be  afraid  in  the  full  sense.  Fear  proper  betrays 
itself  in  the  stare,  the  grave  look,  and  in  such  movements 
as  turning  away  and  hiding  the  face  against  the  nurse's  or 
mother's  shoulder,  and  sometimes  in  covering  it  with  the 
hands.  In  severer  forms  it  leads  to  trembling  and  to  wild 
shrieking.  Changes  of  colour  also  occur.  It  is  commonly 
said  that  great  fear  produces  paleness;  but  according  to  one 
of  my  correspondents  who  has  had  considerable  experience, 
a  child  may  show  the  feeling  by  his  face  turning  scarlet. 
Fear,  if  not  very  intense,  leads  to  voluntary  movements,  as 
turning  away,  putting  the  object  aside,  or  moving  away.  In 
its  more  violent  forms,  however,  it  paralyses  the  child.  It 

1  Perez  regards  these  as  signs  of  fear,  and  points  out  that  tremu- 
lous movements  may  occur  in  the  fetus  (L 'Education  d2s  le  berceau, 
p.  94). 

2  For  an  account  of  this  reflex,  see  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  Cap.  10,  176. 

13 


194  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

is    desirable    that   parents    should    carefully   observe   and 
describe  the  first  signs  of  fear  in  their  children. l 

Startling  Effect  of  Sounds, 

It  may  be  well  to  begin  our  study  of  fear  by  a  reference 
to  the  effect  of  startling.  As  is  well  known,  sudden  and 
loud  sounds,  as  that  of  a  door  banging,  will  give  a  shock 
to  an  infant  in  the  first  weeks  of  life,  which  though  not 
amounting  to  fear  is  its  progenitor.  A  clearer  manifesta- 
tion occurs  when  a  new  and  unfamiliar  sound  calls  forth 
the  grave  look,  the  trembling  lip,  and  possibly  the  fit  of 
crying.  Darwin  gives  an  excellent  example  of  this.  He 
had,  he  tells  us,  been  accustomed  to  make  all  sorts  of 
sudden  noises  with  his  boy,  aged  four  and  a  half  months, 
which  were  well  received  ;  but  one  day  having  introduced  a 
new  sound,  that  of  a  loud  snoring,  he  found  that  the  child 
was  quite  upset,  bursting  out  into  a  fit  of  crying.'2 

As  this  incident  suggests,  it  is  not  every  new  sound 
which  is  thus  disconcerting  to  the  little  stranger.  Sudden 
sharp  sounds  of  any  kind  seem  to  be  especially  disliked,  as 
those  of  a  dog's  bark.  The  child  M.  burst  out  crying  on 
first  hearing  the  sound  of  a  baby  rattle  ;  and  she  did  the 
same  two  months  later  on  accidentally  ringing  a  hand  bell. 
Louder  and  more  voluminous  sounds,  too,  are  apt  to  have 
an  alarming  effect.  The  big  noise  of  a  factory,  of  a  steam- 
ship, of  a  passing  train,  are  among  the  sounds  assigned  by 
my  correspondents  as  causes  of  this  early  startling  and 
upsetting  effect.  A  little  girl  when  taken  into  the  country 
at  the  age  of  nine  months,  though  she  liked  the  animals 
she  saw  on  the  whole,  showed  fear  by  seeking  shelter  against 
the  nurse's  shoulder,  on  hearing  the  bleating  of  the  sheep. 
So  strong  is  this  effect  of  suddenness  and  volume  of  sound 

1  I  know  of  no  good  account  of  the  manifestations  of  childish 
fear.     Mosso's  book,  La  Peur,  chap.  v.  and  following,  will  be  found 
most  useful  here. 

2  Mind,  vol.  ii.,  p.  288. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  195 

that  even  musical  sounds  often  excite  some  alarm  at  first. 
'  He  (a  boy  of  four  months)  cried  when  he  first  heard  the 
piano,'  writes  one  lady,  and  this  is  but  a  sample  of  many 
observations.  A  child  of  five  and  a  half  months  showed 
such  a  horror  of  a  banjo  that  he  would  scream  if  it 
were  played  or  only  touched.  Preyer's  boy  at  sixteen 
months  was  apparently  alarmed  when  his  father,  in  order  to 
entertain  him,  produced  what  seems  to  us  a  particularly 
pure  musical  tone  by  rubbing  a  drinking-glass.  He  remarks 
that  this  same  sound  had  been  produced  when  the  child 
was  four  months  old  without  any  ill  effects.1 

This  last  fact  suggests  that  such  shrinkings  from  sound 
may  be  developed  at  a  comparatively  late  date.  This  idea 
is  supported  by  other  observations.  "  From  about  two 
years  four  months  (writes  a  mother)  to  the  present  time 
(two  years  eleven  months),  he  has  shown  signs  of  fear  of 
music.  At  two  years  five  months  he  liked  some  singing  of 
rounds,  but  when  a  fresh  person  with  a  stronger  voice  than 
the  rest  joined,  he  begged  the  singer  to  stop.  Presently  he 
tolerated  the  singing  as  long  as  he  might  stand  at  the 
farthest  corner  of  the  room."  This  child  was  also  about 
the  same  time  afraid  of  the  piano,  and  of  the  organ,  when 
played  by  his  mother  in  a  church. 

It  is  worth  noting  that  animals  show  a  similar  dread  of 
musical  sounds.  I  took  a  young  cat  of  about  eight  weeks 
in  my  lap  and  struck  some  chords  not  loudly  on  the  piano. 
It  got  up,  moved  uneasily  from  side  to  side,  then  bolted 
to  the  corner  of  the  room  and  seemed  to  try  to  get  up  the 
walls.  Dogs,  too,  certainly  seem  to  be  put  out,  if  not  to 
experience  fear,  at  the  music  of  a  brass  band. 

It  is  sometimes  supposed  that  this  startling  effect  of 
loud  sounds  is  wholly  an  affair  of  nervous  disturbance : 2 
but  the  late  development  of  the  repugnance  in  certain 

1  Op.  cit.,  p.  131. 

2  This  seems  to  be  the  view  of  Perez  :     The  First  Three  Years  of 
Childhood  (English  translation),  p.  64. 


196  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

cases  seems  to  show  that  this  is  not  the  only  cause  at  work. 
Of  course  a  child's  nervous  organisation  may  through  ill 
health  become  more  sensitive  to  this  disturbing  effect;  and, 
as  the  life  of  Chopin  tells  us,  the  delicate  organisation  of 
a  future  musician  may  be  specially  subject  to  these  shocks. 
Yet  I  suspect  that  vague  alarm  at  the  unexpected  and  un- 
known takes  part  here.  There  is  something  uncanny  to 
the  child  in  the  very  production  of  sound  from  a  silent 
thing.  A  banjo  lying  now  inert,  harmless,  and  then 
suddenly  firing  off  a  whole  gamut  of  sound  may  well 
shock  a  small  child's  preconceptions  of  things.  The  second 
time  that  fear  was  observed  in  one  child  at  the  age  of  ten 
months,  it  was  excited  by  a  new  toy  which  squeaked  on 
being  pressed.1  This  seems  to  be  another  example  of  the 
disconcerting  effect  of  the  unexpected.  In  other  cases  the 
alarming  effect  of  the  mystery  is  increased  by  the  absence 
of  all  visible  cause.  One  little  boy  of  two  years  used  to 
get  sadly  frightened  at  the  sound  of  the  water  rushing  into 
the  cistern  which  was  near  his  nursery.  The  child  was 
afraid  at  the  same  time  of  thunder,  calling  it  '  water 
coming'. 

I  am  far  from  saying  that  all  children  manifest  this 
fear  of  sounds.  Miss  Shinn  points  out  that  her  niece  was 
from  the  first  pleased  with  the  piano,  and  this  is  no  doubt  true 
of  many  children.  Children  behave  very  differently  towards 
thunder,  some  being  greatly  disturbed  by  it,  others  being 
rather  delighted.  Thus  Preyer's  boy,  who  was  so  igno- 
miniously  upset  by  the  tone  of  the  drinking-glass,  laughed 
at  the  thunderstorm  ;  and  we  know  that  the  little  Walter 
Scott  was  once  found  during  a  thunderstorm  lying  on  his 
back  in  the  open  air  clapping  his  hands  and  shouting 
"  Bonnie,  bonnie  ! "  at  the  flashes  of  lightning.  It  is  possible 
that  in  such  cases  the  exhilarating  effect  of  the  brightness 
counteracts  the  uncanny  effect  of  the  thunder.  More 
observations  are  needed  on  this  point. 

1  Observation  of  F.  H.  Champneys,  Mind,  vol.  vi.,  p.  106. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  1 97 

A  complete  explanation  of  these  early  vague  alarms  of 
the  ear  may  as  yet  not  be  possible.  Children  show  in  the 
matter  of  sound  capricious  repugnances  which  it  is  ex- 
ceedingly difficult  to  account  for.  They  seem  sometimes 
to  have  their  pet  aversions  like  older  folk.  Yet  I  think 
that  a  general  explanation  is  possible. 

To  begin  with,  then,  it  is  probable  that  in  many  of 
these  cases,  especially  those  occurring  in  the  first  six 
months,  we  have  to  do  with  an  organic  phenomenon,  with 
a  sort  of  jar  to  the  nervous  system.  To  understand  this 
we  have  to  remember  that  the  ear,  in  the  case  of  man  at 
least,  is  the  sense-organ  through  which  the  nervous  system  is 
most  powerfully  and  profoundly  acted  on.  Sounds  seem 
to  go  through  us,  to  pierce  us,  to  shake  us,  to  pound  and 
crush  us.  A  child  of  four  or  six  months  has  a  nervous 
organisation  still  weak  and  unstable,  and  we  should 
naturally  expect  loud  sounds  to  produce  a  disturbing 
effect  on  it. 

To  this  it  is  to  be  added  that  sounds  have  a  way  of 
taking  us  by  surprise,  of  seeming  to  start  out  of  nothing  ; 
and  this  aspect  of  them,  as  I  have  pointed  out  above,  may 
well  excite  vague  alarm  in  the  small  creatures  to  whom  all 
that  is  new  and  unlocked  for  is  apt  to  seem  uncanny. 
The  fact  that  most  children  soon  lose  their  fear  by  getting 
used  to  the  sounds  seems  to  show  how  much  the  new  and 
the  mysterious  has  to  do  with  the  effect. 

Whether  heredity  plays  any  part  here,  e.g.,  in  the  fear  of 
the  dog's  barking  and  other  sounds  of  animals,  seems  to 
me  exceedingly  doubtful.  This  point  will,  however,  come 
up  for  closer  consideration  presently,  when  we  deal  with 
children's  fear  of  animals. 

Before  considering  the  manifold  outgoings  of  fear  pro- 
duced by  impressions  of  the  eye,  we  may  glance  at  another 
form  of  early  disturbance  which  has  some  analogy  to  the 
shock-like  effects  of  certain  sounds.  I  refer  here  to  the 
feeling  of  bodily  insecurity  which  appears  very  early  when 


198  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  child  is  awkwardly  carried,  or  let  down  back-foremost,, 
and  later  when  he  begins  to  walk.  One  child  in  her  fifth 
month  was  observed  when  carried  to  hold  on  to  the  nurse's 
dress  as  if  for  safety.  And  it  has  been  noticed  by  more 
than  one  observer  that  on  dandling  a  baby  up  and  down 
in  one's  arms,  it  will  on  descending,  that  is  when  the  sup- 
port of  the  arms  is  being  withdrawn,  show  signs  of  dis- 
content in  struggling  movements.1  Bell,  Preyer,  and  others 
regard  this  as  an  instinctive  form  of  fear.  Such  manifesta- 
tions may,  however,  be  merely  the  result  of  sudden  and 
rude  disturbances  of  the  sense  of  bodily  ease  which  attends 
the  habitual  condition  of  adequate  support.  A  child  ac- 
customed to  lie  in  a  cradle,  on  the  floor,  or  on  somebody's 
lap,  might  be  expected  to  be  put  out  when  the  supporting 
mass  is  greatly  reduced,  as  in  bad  carrying,  or  wholly 
removed,  as  in  quickly  lowering  him  backwards.  The 
fear  of  falling,  which  shows  itself  during  the  first  attempts 
to  stand,  comes,  it  must  be  remembered,  as  an  accom- 
paniment of  a  new  and  highly  strange  situation.  The  first 
experience  of  using  the  legs  for  support  must,  one  supposes,, 
involve  a  profound  change  in  the  child's  whole  bodily 
consciousness,  a  change  which  may  well  be  accompanied 
with  a  sense  of  disturbance.  Not  only  so,  it  comes  after 
a  considerable  experience  of  partial  fallings,  as  in  trying 
to  turn  over  when  lying,  half  climbing  the  sides  of  the 
cradle,  etc.,  and  still  harder  bumpings  when  the  crawling 
stage  is  reached.  These  would,  I  suspect,  be  quite  suf- 
ficient to  produce  the  timidity  which  is  observable  on 
making  the  bolder  venture  of  standing.2 

Fear  of  Visible  Things. 

Fears  excited  by  visual   impressions  come  later  than 
those  excited  by  sounds.     The  reason  of  this  seems  pretty 

1  See  the  quotations  from  Sir  Ch.  Bell,  Perez,  First  Three  Years- 
of  Childhood,  p.  63. 

-  Preyer  seems  to  regard  this  as  instinctive.     Op.  cit.,  p.  131. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  199 

obvious.  Visual  sensations  do  not  produce  the  strong 
effect  of  nervous  shock  which  auditory  ones  produce.  Let 
a  person  compare  the  violent  and  profound  jar  which  he 
experiences  on  suddenly  hearing  a  loud  sound,  with  the 
slight  surface-agitation  produced  by  the  sudden  movement 
of  an  object  across  the  field  of  vision.  The  latter  has  less 
of  the  effect  of  nervous  jar  and  more  of  the  characteristics 
of  fear  proper,  that  is,  apprehension  of  evil.  We  should 
accordingly  expect  that  eye-fears  would  only  begin  to 
show  themselves  in  the  child  after  experience  had  begun 
its  educative  work.1 

At  the  outset  it  is  well,  as  in  the  case  of  the  ear-fears, 
to  keep  before  us  the  distinction  between  a  mere  dislike  to 
a  sensation  and  a  true  reaction  of  fear.  We  shall  find  that 
children's  quasi-aesthetic  dislikes  to  certain  colours  may 
readily  simulate  the  appearance  of  fears. 

Among  the  earliest  manifestations  of  fear  excited  by 
visual  impressions  we  have  those  called  forth  by  the  pre- 
sentation of  something  new  and  strange,  especially  when 
it  involves  a  rupture  of  customary  arrangements.  Although 
children  love  and  delight  in  what  is  new,  their  disposition 
to  fear  is  apt  to  give  to  new  and  strange  objects  a  disquiet- 
ing, if  not  distinctly  alarming  character.  This  apprehension 
shows  itself  as  soon  as  a  child  has  begun  to  be  used  or 
accustomed  to  a  particular  state  of  things. 

Among  the  more  disconcerting  effects  of  a  rude 
departure  from  the  customary,  we  have  that  of  change  of 
place.  At  first  the  infant  betrays  no  sign  of  disturbance 
on  being  carried  into  a  new  room.  But  when  once  it  has 
grown  accustomed  to  a  certain  room  it  will  feel  a  new  one  to 

1  M.  Perez  (op.  cit.,  p.  65)  calls  in  the  evolution  hypothesis  here, 
suggesting  that  the  child,  unlike  the  young  animal,  is  so  organised 
as  to  be  more  on  the  alert  for  dangers  which  are  near  at  hand 
(auditory  impressions)  than  for  those  at  a  distance  (visual  impres- 
sions). I  confess,  however,  that  I  find  this  ingenious  writer  not 
quite  convincing  here. 


200  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

be  strange,  and  eye  its  features  with  a  perceptibly  anxious 
look.  This  sense  of  strangeness  in  place  sometimes 
appears  very  early.  The  little  girl  M.,  on  being  taken  at 
the  age  of  four  months  into  a  new  nursery,  "  looked  all  round 
and  then  burst  out  crying".  This  feeling  of  uneasiness 
may  linger  late.  A  boy  retained  up  to  the  age  of  three 
years  eight  months  the  fear  of  being  left  alone  in  strange 
hotels  or  lodgings.  Yet  entrance  on  a  new  abode  does 
not  by  any  means  always  excite  this  reaction.  A  child 
may  have  his  curiosity  excited,  or  may  be  amused  by  the 
odd  look  of  things.  Thus  one  boy  on  being  taken  at  the 
age  of  fifteen  months  to  a  fresh  house  and  given  a  small 
plain  room  looked  round  and  laughed  at  the  odd  carpet. 
Children  even  of  the  same  age  appear  in  such  circumstances 
to  vary  greatly  with  respect  to  the  relative  strength  of  the 
impulses  of  fear  and  curiosity. 

How  different  children's  mental  attitude  may  be  towards 
the  new  and  unfamiliar  is  illustrated  by  some  notes  on  a 
boy  sent  me  by  his  mother.  This  child,  "  though  hardly 
ever  afraid  of  strange  people  or  places,  was  very  much 
frightened  as  a  baby  of  familiar  things  seen  after  an  in- 
terval". Thus  "  at  ten  months  he  was  excessively  frightened 
on  returning  to  his  nursery  after  a  month's  absence.  On 
this  occasion  he  screamed  violently  if  his  nurse  left  his  side 
for  a  moment  for  some  hours  after  he  got  home,  whereas 
he  had  not  in  the  least  objected  to  being  installed  in  a 
strange  nursery."  The  mother  adds  that  "  at  thirteen 
months,  his  memory  having  grown  stronger,  he  was  very 
much  pleased  at  coming  to  his  home  after  being  away  a 
fortnight ".  This  case  looks  puzzling  enough  at  first,  and 
seems  to  contradict  the  laws  of  infant  psychology.  Per- 
haps the  child's  partial  recognition  was  accompanied  by  a 
sense  of  the  uncanny,  like  that  which  we  experience  when 
a  place  seems  familiar  to  us  though  we  have  no  clear 
recollection  of  having  seen  it  before. 

What   applies    to    places    applies   also   to  persons :    a 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  2OI 

sudden  change  of  customary  human  surroundings  by  the 
arrival  of  a  stranger  on  the  scene  is  apt  to  trouble  the 
child. 

At  first  all  faces  seem  alike  for  the  child.  Later  on 
unfamiliar  faces  excite  something  like  a  grave  inquisitorial 
scrutiny.  Yet,  for  the  first  three  months,  there  is  no 
distinct  manifestation  of  a  fear  of  strangers.  It  is  only  later, 
when  attachment  to  human  belongings  has  been  developed, 
that  the  approach  of  a  stranger,  especially  if  accompanied 
by  a  proposal  to  take  the  child,  calls  forth  clear  signs  of 
displeasure  and  the  shrinking  away  of  fear.  Preyer  gives 
the  sixth  and  seventh  months  as  the  date  at  which  his  boy 
began  to  cry  at  the  sight  of  a  strange  face.  In  one  set  of 
notes  sent  me  it  was  remarked  that  a  child  of  four  and  a 
half  months  would  cry  on  being  nursed  by  a  stranger. 
To  be  nursed  by  a  stranger,  however,  is  to  have  the 
whole  baby-world  revolutionised  ;  little  wonder  then 
that  it  should  bring  the  feeling  of  strangeness  and  home- 
lessness. 

Here,  too,  curious  differences  soon  begin  to  disclose 
themselves,  some  children  being  decidedly  more  sociable 
towards  strangers  than  others.  It  would  be  curious  to 
compare  the  age  at  which  children  begin  to  take  kindly 
to  them.  Preyer  gives  nineteen  months  as  the  date  at 
which  his  boy  surmounted  his  timidity  ;  but  it  is  probable 
that  the  transition  occurs  at  very  different  dates  in  the 
case  of  different  children.1 

It  is  worth  noting  that  the  little  boy  to  whom  I  re- 
ferred just  now  displayed  the  same  signs  of  uneasiness  at 
seeing  old  friends,  after  an  interval,  as  at  returning  to  old 
scenes.  When  eight  months  old,  "  he  moaned  in  a  curious 
way  when  his  nurse  (of  whom  he  was  very  fond)  came 
home  after  a  fortnight's  holiday".  Here,  however,  the 
signs  of  fear  seem  to  be  less  pronounced  than  in  the  case 

1  This  true  fear  of  strangers  must  be  distinguished  from  the  later 
shyness,  which,  though  akin  to  it,  is  a  more  complex  feeling. 


202  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

of  returning  to  the  old  room.  It  would  be  difficult  to  give 
the  right  name  to  this  curious  moan. 

Partial  alteration  of  the  surroundings  frequently  brings 
about  a  measure  of  this  same  mental  uneasiness.  Preyer's 
boy  when  one  year  and  five  months  old  was  much  dis- 
turbed at  seeing  his  mother  in  a  black  dress.  Children  seem 
to  have  a  special  dislike  to  black  apparel.  George  Sand 
describes  her  fear  at  having  to  put  on  black  stockings  when 
her  father  died.  Yet  any  change  of  colour  in  dress  will 
disturb  a  child.  C.,  when  an  infant,  was  distressed  to  tears 
at  the  spectacle  of  a  new  colour  and  pattern  on  his  mother's 
dress.  This  dislike  to  any  change  of  dress  as  such  is  borne 
out  by  other  observations.  A  child  manifested  between  the 
age  of  about  seven  months  and  of  two  and  a  half  years 
the  most  marked  repugnance  to  new  clothes,  so  that  the 
authorities  found  it  very  difficult  to  get  them  on.  It  is 
presumable  that  the  donning  of  new  apparel  disturbed  too 
rudely  the  child's  sense  of  his  proper  self. 

In  certain  cases  the  introduction  of  new  natural  objects 
of  great  extent  and  impressiveness  will  produce  a  similar 
effect  of  childish  anxiety,  as  though  they  made  too  violent 
a  change  in  the  surroundings.  One  of  the  best  illustrations 
of  this  obtainable  from  the  life  of  an  average  well-to-do 
child  is  the  impression  produced  by  a  first  visit  to  the  sea. 
Preyer's  boy  at  the  age  of  twenty-one  months  showed  all 
the  signs  of  fear  when  his  nurse  carried  him  on  her  arm 
close  to  the  sea.1  The  boy  C.  on  being  first  taken  near  the 
sea  at  the  age  of  two  was  disturbed  by  its  noise.  While, 
however,  I  have  a  number  of  well-authenticated  cases  of 
such  an  instinctive  repugnance  to,  and  something  like  dread 
of  the  sea,  I  find  that  there  is  by  no  means  uniformity  in 
children's  behaviour  in  this  particular.  A  little  boy  who 
first  saw  the  sea  at  the  age  of  thirteen  months  exhibited 
signs  not  of  fear  but  of  wondering  delight,  prettily  stretching 
out  his  tiny  hands  towards  it  as  if  wanting  to  go  to  it. 

1  Op.  cit.,  p.  131. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  203 

Another  child  who  also  first  saw  the  sea  at  the  age  of 
thirteen  months  began  to  crawl  towards  the  waves.  And 
yet  another  boy  at  the  age  of  twenty-one  months  on  first 
seeing  the  sea  spread  his  arms  as  if  to  embrace  it. 

These  observations  show  that  the  strange  big  thing 
affects  children  very  differently.  C.  had  a  particular  dislike 
to  noises,  which  was,  I  think,  early  strengthened  by  finding 
out  that  his  father  had  the  same  prejudice.  Hence  perhaps 
his  hostile  attitude  towards  the  sea. 

Probably,  too,  imaginative  children,  whose  minds  take 
in  something  of  the  bigness  of  the  sea,  will  be  more  disposed 
to  this  variety  of  fear.  A  mother  writes  me  that  her  elder 
child,  an  imaginative  girl,  has  not  even  now  at  the  age  of 
six  got  over  her  fear  of  going  into  the  sea,  whereas  her 
sister,  one  and  a  quarter  years  younger,  and  not  of  an 
imaginative  temperament,  is  perfectly  fearless.  She  adds 
that  it  is  the  bigness  of  the  sea  which  evidently  impresses 
the  imagination  of  the  elder. 

Imaginative  children,  too,  are  apt  to  give  life  and  pur- 
pose to  the  big  moving  noisy  thing.  This  is  illustrated  in 
M.  Pierre  Loti's  graphic  account  of  his  first  childish  im- 
pressions of  the  sea,  seen  one  evening  in  the  twilight.  "  It 
was  of  a  dark,  almost  black  green  :  it  seemed  restless, 
treacherous,  ready  to  swallow :  it  was  stirring  and  swaying 
everywhere  at  the  same  time,  with  the  look  of  sinister 
wickedness."  l 

There  seems  enough  in  the  vast  waste  of  unresting 
waters  to  excite  the  imagination  of  a  child  to  awe  and 
terror.  Hence  it  is  needless  to  follow  M.  Loti  in  his 
speculations  as  to  an  inherited  fear  of  the  sea.  He  seems 
to  base  this  supposition  on  the  fact  that  at  this  first  view  he 
distinctly  recognised  the  sea.  But  such  recognition  may 
have  meant  merely  the  objective  realisation  of  what  had  no 
doubt  been  before  pretty  fully  described  by  his  mother  and 
aunt,  and  imaginatively  pictured  by  himself. 

1  Le  Roman  d'un  Enfant. 


204  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

The  opposite  attitude,  that  of  the  thoroughly  unimagin- 
ative child,  in  presence  of  the  sea  is  well  illustrated  by  the 
story  of  a  little  girl  aged  two,  who,  on  being  first  taken  to 
see  the  watery  wonder,  exclaimed,  "  Oh,  mamma,  look  at  the 
soapy  water ".  The  awful  mystery  of  all  the  stretch  of 
ever-moving  water  was  invisible  to  this  child,  being  hidden 
behind  the  familiar  detail  of  the  '  soapy  '  edge. 

There  is  probably  nothing  in  the  natural  world  which 
makes  on  the  childish  imagination  quite  so  awful  an  im- 
pression as  the  watery  Leviathan.  Perhaps  the  fear  which 
one  of  my  correspondents  tells  me  was  excited  in  her  when 
a  child  by  the  sudden  appearance  of  a  mountain  may  be 
akin  to  this  dread  of  the  sea. 

We  may  now  pass  to  another  group  of  fear-excitants, 
the  appearance  of  certain  strange  forms  and  movements  of 
objects. 

The  close  connexion  between  aesthetic  dislike  and  fear 
is  seen  in  the  well-marked  recoilings  of  children  from  odd 
uncanny-looking  dolls.  The  girl  M.,  when  just  over  six 
months  old,  was  frightened  at  a  Japanese  doll  so  that  it 
had  to  be  put  in  another  room.  Another  child  when 
thirteen  months  old  was  terrified  at  the  sight  of  an 
ugly  doll.  The  said  doll  is  described  as  black  with 
woolly  head,  startled  eyes,  and  red  lips.  Such  an  ogre 
might  well  call  up  a  tremor  in  the  bravest  of  children. 
In  another  case,  that  of  a  little  boy  of  two  years  and  two 
months,  the  broken  face  of  a  doll  proved  to  be  highly  dis- 
concerting. The  mother  describes  the  effect  as  mixed  of 
fear,  distress,  and  intellectual  wonder.  Nor  did  his  anxiety 
depart  when  some  hours  later  the  doll,  after  sleeping  in 
his  mother's  room,  reappeared  with  a  new  face. 

In  such  cases,  it  seems  plain,  it  is  the  ugly  transforma- 
tion of  something  specially  familiar  and  agreeable  which 
excites  the  feeling  of  nervous  apprehension.  Making 
grimaces,  that  is  the  spoiling  of  the  typical  familiar  face, 
may,  it  is  said,  disturb  a  child  even  at  the  early  age  of  two 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  205 

months.1  It  is  much  the  same  when  the  child  M.,  at  the 
age  of  thirteen  months  three  weeks,  was  frightened  and 
howled  when  a  lady  looked  at  her  close  with  blue  spectacles, 
though  she  was  quite  used  to  ordinary  glasses.  Such  trans- 
formations of  the  homely  and  assuring  face  are,  moreover, 
not  only  ugly  but  bewildering  to  the  child,  and  where  all  is 
mysterious  and  uncanny  the  child  is  apt  to  fear.  Whether 
"  inherited  associations  "  involving  a  dim  recognition  of  the 
meaning  of  these  distortions  play  any  part  here  I  do  not 
feel  at  all  certain. 

Children,  like  animals,  will  sometimes  show  fear  at  the 
sight  of  what  seems  to  us  a  quite  harmless  object.  A  shying 
horse  is  a  puzzle  to  his  rider :  his  terrors  are  so  unpredict- 
able. Similarly  in  the  case  of  a  timid  child  almost  any- 
thing unfamiliar  and  out  of  the  way,  whether  in  the  colour, 
the  form,  or  the  movement  of  an  object,  may  provoke  a 
measure  of  anxiety.  Thus  a  little  girl,  aged  one  year  and 
ten  months,  showed  signs  of  fear  during  a  drive  at  a  row  of 
grey  ash  trees  placed  along  the  road.  This  was  just  the 
kind  of  thing  that  a  horse  might  shy  at. 

As  with  animals,  so  with  children,  any  seemingly 
uncaused  movement  is  apt  to  excite  a  feeling  of  alarm. 
Just  as  a  dog  will  run  away  from  a  leaf  whirled  about  by  the 
wind,  so  children  are  apt  to  be  terrified  by  the  strange  and 
quite  irregular  behaviour  of  a  feather  as  it  glides  along  the 
floor  or  lifts  itself  into  the  air.  A  little  girl  of  three,  stand- 
ing by  the  bedside  of  her  mother  (who  was  ill  at  the  time), 
was  so  frightened  at  the  sight  of  a  feather,  which  she  acci- 
dentally pulled  out  of  the  eiderdown  quilt,  floating  in  the  air 
that  she  would  not  approach  the  bed  for  days  afterwards.2 

In  these  cases  we  may  suppose  that  we  have  to  do  with 
a  germ  of  superstitious  fear,  which  seems  commonly  to  have 
its  starting  point  in  the  appearance  of  something  excep- 

1  Quoted  by  Tracy,  op.  cit.,  p.  29.  But  this  observation  seems  to 
me  to  need  confirmation. 

-  See  The  Pedagogical  Seminary,  i.,  No.  2,  p.  220. 


206  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

tional  and  uncanny,  that  is  to  say,  unintelligible,  and  so 
smacking  of  the  supernatural.  The  fear  of  feathers  as 
uncanny  objects  plays,  I  am  told,  a  considerable  part  in 
the  superstitions  of  folk-lore.  Such  apparently  self-caused 
movements,  so  suggestive  of  life,  might  easily  give  rise  to 
a  vague  sense  of  a  mysterious  presence  or  power  possess- 
ing the  object,  and  so  lead  to  a  crude  form  of  a  belief  in 
supernatural  agents. 

In  other  cases  of  unexpected  and  mysterious  movement 
the  fear  is  slightly  different.  A  little  boy  when  one  year  and 
eleven  months  old  was  frightened  when  in  a  lady's  house  by  a 
toy  elephant  which  shook  its  head.  The  same  child,  writes 
his  mother,  "  at  one  year  seven  months  was  very  much 
scared  by  a  toy  cow  which  mooed  realistically  when  its 
head  was  moved.  This  cow  was  subsequently  given  to 
him,  at  about  two  years  and  three  months.  He  was  then 
still  afraid  of  it,  but  became  reconciled  soon  after,  first 
allowing  others  to  make  it  moo  if  he  was  at  a  safe  distance, 
and  at  last  making  it  moo  himself." 

There  may  have  been  a  germ  of  the  fear  of  animals  here  : 
but  I  suspect  that  it  was  mainly  a  feeling  of  uneasiness  at 
the  signs  of  life  (movement  and  sound)  appearing  when  they 
are  not  expected,  and  have  an  uncanny  aspect.  The  close 
simulation  of  a  living  thing  by  what  is  known  to  be  not 
alive  is  disturbing  to  the  child  as  to  the  adult.  He  will 
make  his  toys  alive  by  his  own  fancy,  yet  resent  their  taking 
on  the  full  semblance  of  reality.  In  this  sense  he  is  a  born 
idealist  and  not  a  realist.  More  careful  observations  on 
this  curious  group  of  child-fears  are  to  be  desired. 

The  fear  of  shadows  is  closely  related  to  that  of  moving 
toys.  They  are  semblances,  though  horribly  distorted 
semblances,  and  they  are  apt  to  move  with  an  awful  rapidity. 
The  unearthly  mounting  shadows  which  accompany  the 
child  as  he  climbs  the  staircase  at  night  have  been  in- 
stanced by  writers  as  one  of  childhood's  freezing  horrors. 
Mr.  Stevenson  writes:  — 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  2O/ 

Now  my  little  heart  goes  beating  like  a  drum, 

With  the  breath  of  the  Bogie  in  my  hair; 

And  all  round  the  candle  the  crooked  shadows  come, 

And  go  marching  along  up  the  stair ; 

The  shadow  of  the  balusters,  the  shadow  of  the  lamp, 

The  shadow  of  the  child  that  goes  to  bed — 

All  the  wicked  shadows  coming  tramp,  tramp,  tramp, 

With  the  black  night  overhead. 

I  have  noticed  a  young  cat — the  same  that  showed  such 
terror  at  the  playing  of  the  piano — watch  its  own  shadow 
rising  on  the  wall,  and,  as  I  thought,  with  a  look  of  appre- 
hension. 

The  Fear  of  Animals. 

I  have  purposely  reserved  for  special  discussion  two 
varieties  of  children's  fear,  namely,  dread  of  animals  and 
of  the  dark.  As  the  former  certainly  manifests  itself  before 
the  latter  I  will  take  it  first. 

It  seems  odd  that  the  creatures  which  are  to  become 
the  companions  and  playmates  of  children,  and  one  of  the 
chief  sources  of  their  happiness,  should  cause  so  much  alarm 
when  they  first  come  on  the  scene.  Yet  so  it  is.  Many 
children,  at  least,  are  at  first  put  out  by  quite  harmless 
members  of  the  animal  family.  We  must,  however,  be 
careful  here  in  distinguishing  between  mere  nerve-shock 
and  dislike  on  the  one  hand  and  genuine  fear  on  the  other. 
Thus  a  lady  whom  I  know,  a  good  observer,  tells  me 
that  her  boy,  though  when  he  was  fifteen  months  old  his 
nerves  were  shaken  by  the  loud  barking  of  a  dog,  had  no 
real  fear  of  dogs.  With  this  may  be  contrasted  another  case, 
also  sent  by  a  good  observer,  in  which  it  is  specially  noted 
that  the  aversion  to  the  sound  of  a  dog's  barking  developed 
late  and  was  a  true  fear. 

/Esthetic  dislikes,  again,  may  easily  give  rise  to  quasi- 
fears,  though,  as  we  all  know,  little  children  have  not  the 
horrors  of  their  elders  in  this  respect.  The  boy  C.  could 


208  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

not  understand  his  mother's  scare  at  the  descending  cater- 
pillar. A  kind  of  aesthetic  dislike  appears  to  show  itself 
sometimes  towards  animals  of  peculiar  shape  and  colour. 
A  black  animal,  as  a  sheep  or  a  cow,  seems  more  particu- 
larly to  come  in  for  these  childish  aversions. 

At  first  it  seems  impossible  to  understand  why  a 
child  in  the  fourteenth  week  should  shrink  from  a  cat.1 
This  is  not,  so  far  as  I  can  gather,  a  common  occurrence  at 
this  age,  and  one  would  like  to  cross-examine  the  mother 
on  the  precise  way  in  which  the  child  had  its  first  intro- 
duction to  the  domestic  pet.  So  far  as  one  can  speculate 
on  the  matter,  one  would  say  that  such  early  shrinking 
from  animals  is  probably  due  to  their  sudden  unexpected 
movements,  which  may  well  disconcert  the  inexperienced 
infant  accustomed  to  comparatively  restful  surroundings. 

This  seems  borne  out  by  another  instance,  also  quoted 
by  Preyer,  of  a  girl  who  in  the  fourth  month,  as  also  in 
the  eleventh,  was  so  afraid  of  pigeons  that  she  could  not 
bring  herself  to  stroke  them.  The  prettiness  of  the  pigeon, 
if  not  of  the  cat,  ought,  one  supposes,  to  ensure  the  liking  of 
children  ;  and  one  has  to  fall  back  on  the  supposition  of 
the  first  disconcerting  strangeness  of  the  moving  animal 
world  for  the  child's  mind. 

Later  shrinkings  from  animals  show  more  of  the  nature 
of  fear.  It  is  sometimes  said  that  children  inherit  from 
their  ancestors  the  fear  of  certain  animals.  Thus  Darwin, 
observing  that  his  boy  when  taken  to  the  Zoological 
Gardens  at  the  age  of  two  years  and  three  months  showed 
fear  of  the  big  caged  animals  whose  form  was  unfamiliar 
to  him  (lions,  tigers,  etc.),  infers  that  this  fear  is  transmitted 
from  savage  ancestors  whose  conditions  of  life  compelled 
them  to  shun  these  deadly  creatures.  But  as  M.  Compayre 
has  well  shown  z  we  do  not  need  this  hypothesis  here.  The 
unfamiliarity  of  the  form  of  the  animal,  its  bigness,  together 

1  Quoted  by  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  p.  127.    The  word  he  uses  is  "scheuen". 

2  Evolution  intellectuelle  et  morale  de  I' 'Enfant,  p.  102. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  2OO. 

with  the  awful  suggestions  of  the  cage,  would    be  quite 
enough  to  beget  a  vague  sense  of  danger. 

So  far  as  I  can  ascertain  facts  are  strongly  opposed  to 
the  theory  of  an  inherited  fear  of  animals.  Just  as  in  the  first 
months  a  child  will  manifest  something  like  recoil  from  a 
pretty  and  perfectly  innocent  pigeon,  so  later  on  children 
manifest  fear  in  the  most  unlikely  directions.  In  The 
Invisible  Playmate,  we  are  told  of  a  girl  who  got  her  first 
fright  on  seeing  a  sparrow  drop  on  the  grass  near  her, 
though  she  was  not  the  least  afraid  of  big  things,  and  on 
first  hearing  the  dog  bark  in  his  kennel  said  with  a  little 
laugh  of  surprise,  '  Oh !  coughing '.  *  A  parallel  case  is 
sent  me  by  a  lady  friend.  One  day  when  her  daughter 
was  about  four  years  old  she  found  her  standing,  the  eyes 
wide  open  and  filled  with  tears,  the  arms  outstretched  for 
help,  evidently  transfixed  with  terror,  while  a  small  wood- 
louse  made  its  slow  way  towards  her.  The  next  day  the 
child  was  taken  for  the  first  time  to  the  "  Zoo,"  and  the 
mother  anticipating  trouble  held  the  child's  hand.  But 
there  was  no  need.  A  'fearless  spirit'  in  general,  she 
released  her  hand  at  the  first  sight  of  the  elephant,  and 
galloped  after  the  monster.  If  inheritance  played  a  prin- 
cipal part  in  the  child's  fear  of  animals  one  would  have 
expected  the  facts  to  be  reversed :  the  elephant  should 
have  excited  dread,  not  the  harmless  insect. 

So  far  as  my  own  observations  have  gone  there  seems 
to  be  but  little  uniformity  among  children's  fears  of  the 
animal  world.  What  frightens  one  child  may  delight 
another  at  about  the  same  age.  Perhaps  there  is  a  tendency 
to  a  special  dread  of  certain  animals,  more  particularly  the 
wolf,  which  as  folk-lore  tells  us  reflects  the  attitude  of 
superstitious  adults.  Yet  it  is  probable  that,  as  the  case  of 
the  boy  C.  suggests,  the  dread  of  the  wolf  grows  out  of 
that  of  the  dog,  the  most  alarming  of  the  domestic  animals, 
while  it  is  vigorously  sustained  by  fairy-story. 
1  See  pp.  26,  27. 


210  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

For  the  rest  children's  shrinking  from  animals  has 
much  of  the  caprice  of  grown-up  people's.  Not  that  there 
is  anything  really  inexplicable  in  these  odd  directions  of 
childish  fear,  any  more  than  in  the  unpredictable  shyings  of 
the  horse.  If  we  knew  the  whole  of  the  horse's  history, 
and  could  keep  a  perfect  register  of  the  fluctuations  of  '  tone ' 
in  his  nervous  system,  we  should  understand  all  his  shyings. 
So  with  the  child.  All  the  vagaries  of  his  dislike  to  animals 
would  be  cleared  up  if  we  could  look  into  the  secret  work- 
ings of  his  mind  and  measure  the  varying  heights  of  his 
courage. 

That  some  of  this  early  disquietude  at  the  sight  of 
strange  animals  is  due  to  the  workings  of  the  mind  is  seen 
in  the  behaviour  of  Preyer's  boy  when  at  the  age  of  twenty- 
seven  months  he  was  taken  to  see  some  little  pigs.  The 
boy  at  the  first  sight  looked  earnest,  and  as  soon  as  the 
lively  little  creatures  began  to  suckle  the  mother  he  broke 
out  into  a  fit  of  crying  and  turned  away  from  the  sight 
with  all  the  signs  of  fear.  It  appeared  afterwards  that  what 
terrified  the  child  was  the  idea  that  the  pigs  were  biting 
their  mother;  and  this  gave  rise  in  the  fourth  and  fifth  years 
to  recurrent  nocturnal  fears  of  the  biting  piglets,  something 
like  C.'s  nocturnal  fear  of  the  wolf.1  To  an  imaginative 
child  strongly  predisposed  to  fear,  anything  suggestive  of 
harm  will  suffice  to  beget  a  measure  of  trepidation.  A 
child  does  not  want  direct  experience  of  the  power  of  a  big 
animal  in  order  to  feel  a  vague  uneasiness  when  near  it. 
His  own  early  inductions  respecting  the  correlation  of 
bigness  with  strength,  aided  as  this  commonly  is  by  in- 
formation picked  up  from  others,  will  amply  suffice.  In  the 
case  of  the  dog,  the  rough  shaggy  coat,  the  teeth  which  he 
is  told  can  bite,  the  swift  movements,  and  worse  than  all 
the  appalling  bark,  are  quite  enough  to  disconcert  a  timid 
child.  Even  the  sudden  pouncing  down  of  a  sparrow  may 
prove  upsetting  to  a  fearful  mite  as  suggesting  attack  ;  and 

1  See  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  p.  130. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  211 

a  girl  of  four  may  be  quite  capable  of  imagining  the  un- 
pleasantness of  an  invasion  of  her  dainty  person  by  a  small 
creeping  wood-louse — which  though  running  slowly  was 
running  towards  herself — and  so  of  getting  a  fit  of 
shudders. 

It  is,  I  think,  undeniable  that  imaginative  children, 
especially  when  sickly  and  disposed  to  alarm,  are  subject 
to  a  real  terror  at  the  thought  of  the  animal  world.  Its 
very  vastness,  the  large  variety  of  its  uncanny  and  savage- 
looking  forms — appearing  oftentimes  as  ugly  distortions  of 
the  human  face  and  figure — this  of  itself,  as  known  from 
picture-books,  may  well  generate  many  a  vague  alarm. 
We  know  from  folk-lore  how  the  dangers  of  the  animal 
world  have  touched  the  imagination  of  simple  peoples, 
and  we  need  not  be  surprised  that  it  should  make  the  heart 
of  the  wee  weakly  child  to  quake.  Yet  the  child's 
shrinking  from  animals  is  less  strong  than  the  impulse  of 
companionship  which  bears  him  towards  them.  Tiny  chil- 
dren quite  as  often  show  the  impulse  to  run  after  ducks 
and  other  animals  as  to  be  alarmed  at  them.  Nothing 
perhaps  is  prettier  in  child-life  than  the  pose  and  look  of 
one  of  these  defenceless  youngsters  as  he  is  getting  over 
his  trepidation  at  the  approach  of  a  strange  big  dog  and 
*  making  friends '  with  the  shaggy  monster.  The  perfect 
love  which  lies  at  the  bottom  of  children's  hearts  towards 
their  animal  kinsfolk  soon  casts  out  fear.  And  when  once 
the  reconciliation  has  been  effected  it  will  take  a  good  deal 
of  harsh  experience  to  make  the  child  ever  again  entertain 
the  thought  of  danger. 

Fear  of  the  Dark. 

Fear  of  the  dark,  that  is,  fear  excited  by  the  actual 
experience  or  the  idea  of  being  in  the  dark,  and  especially 
alone  in  the  dark,  and  the  allied  dread  of  dark  places  as 
closets  and  caves,  is  no  doubt  very  common  among  chil- 
dren, and  seems  indeed  to  be  one  of  their  recognised 


212  STUDIES   OF  CHILDHOOD. 

characteristics.  Yet  it  is  by  no  means  certain  that  it  is 
'  natural '  in  the  sense  of  developing  itself  in  all  children. 

It  is  certain  that  children  have  no  such  fear  at  the 
beginning  of  life.  A  baby  of  three  or  four  months  if  ac- 
customed to  a  light  may  very  likely  be  disturbed  at  being 
deprived  of  it :  but  this  is  some  way  from  a  dread  of  the 
dark.1 

Fear  of  the  dark  seems  to  arise  when  intelligence 
has  reached  a  certain  stage  of  development.  It  apparently 
assumes  a  variety  of  forms.  In  some  children  it  is  a  vague 
uneasiness,  in  others  it  takes  the  shape  of  a  more  definite 
dread.  A  common  variety  of  this  dread  is  connected  with 
the  imaginative  filling  of  the  dark  with  the  forms  of 
alarming  animals,  so  that  the  fear  of  animals  and  of  the 
dark  are  closely  connected.  Thus,  in  one  case  reported  to- 
me, a  boy  between  the  ages  of  two  and  six  used  at  night  to 
see  '  the  eyes  of  lions  and  tigers  glaring  as  they  walked 
round  the  room  '.  The  boy  C.  saw  his  bete  noire  the  wolf 
in  dark  places.  Mr.  Stevens  in  his  note  on  his  boy's  idea 
of  the  supernatural  remarks  that  at  the  age  of  one  year  and 
ten  months,  when  he  began  to  be  haunted  by  the  spectre 
of  '  Cocky,'  he  was  temporarily  seized  with  a  fear  of  the 
dark.2  It  is  important  to  add  that  even  children  who  have 
been  habituated  to  going  to  bed  in  the  dark  in  the  first 
months  are  liable  to  acquire  the  fear. 

This  mode  of  fear  is,  however,  not  universal  among 
children.  One  lady,  for  whose  accuracy  I  can  vouch, 

1  A  mother  sends   me    a    curious   observation   bearing  on  this. 
One  of  her  children  when  four  months  old  was  carried  by  her  up- 
stairs in  the  dark.     On  reaching  the  light  she  found  the  child's  face 
black,  her  hands  clenched,  and  her  eyes   protruding.     As  soon  as 
she  reached  the  light  she  heaved   a  sigh  and  resumed  her  usual 
appearance.     This  child  was  in  general  hardy  and  bold  and  never 
gave  a  second  display  of  terror.     This  is  certainly  a  curious  observa- 
tion, and  it  would  be  well  to  know  whether  similar  cases  of  apparent 
fright  at  being  carried  in  the  dark  have  been  noticed. 

2  Mind,  xi.,  p.  149. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  213 

assures  me  that  her  boy,  who  is  now  four  years  old, 
has  never  manifested  the  feeling.  A  similar  statement 
is  made  by  a  careful  observer,  Dr.  Sikorski,  with  reference 
to  his  own  children.  *  It  seems  possible  to  go  through 
childhood  without  making  acquaintance  with  this  terror, 
and  to  acquire  it  in  later  life.  I  know  a  lady  who  only 
acquired  the  fear  towards  the  age  of  thirty.  "  Curiously 
enough  (she  writes)  I  was  never  afraid  of  the  dark  as  a 
child  ;  but  during  the  last  two  years  I  hate  to  be  left  alone 
in  the  dark,  and  if  I  have  to  enter  a  dark  room,  like  my 
^tudy,  beyond  the  reach  of  the  maids  from  downstairs,  I 
notice  a  remarkable  acceleration  in  my  heart-beat  and 
hurry  to  strike  a  light  or  rush  downstairs  as  quickly  as 
possible." 

We  can  faintly  conjecture  from  what  Charles  Lamb  and 
others  have  told  us  about  the  spectres  that  haunted  their 
nights  what  a  weighty  crushing  horror  this  fear  of  the  dark 
may  become.  Hence  we  need  not  be  surprised  that  the 
writer  of  fiction  has  sought  to  give  it  a  vivid  and  adequate 
description.  Victor  Hugo,  for  example,  when  in  Les 
Miserables  he  is  painting  the  feelings  of  little  Cosette,  who 
has  been  sent  out  alone  at  night  to  fetch  water  from  a 
spring  in  a  wood,  says  she  "  felt  herself  seized  by  the 
black  enormity  of  Nature.  It  was  not  only  terror  which 
possessed  her,  it  was  something  more  terrible  even  than 
terror." 

Different  explanations  have  been  offered  of  this  fear. 
Locke,  who  when  writing  on  educational  matters  was  rather 
hard  on  nurses  and  servants,  puts  down  the  whole  of 
these  fears  to  those  wicked  persons,  "  whose  usual  method 
is  to  awe  children  and  keep  them  in  subjection  by  telling 
them  of  Raw  Head  and  Bloody  Bones,  and  such  other 
names  as  carry  with  them  the  idea  of  something  terrible 
and  hurtful,  which  they  have  reason  to  be  afraid  of  when 

1  Quoted  by  Compayre,  op.  cit.,  p.  100.  Cf.  Perez,  UEducation  dh 
le  berceau,  p.  103. 


214  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

alone,  especially  in  the  dark  "-1  Rousseau  on  the  other 
hand  urges  that  there  is  a  natural  cause.  "  Accustomed  as 
I  am  to  perceive  objects  from  a  distance,  and  to  anticipate 
their  impressions  in  advance,  how  is  it  possible  for  me, 
when  I  no  longer  see  anything  of  the  objects  that  surround 
me,  not  to  imagine  a  thousand  creatures,  a  thousand 
movements,  which  may  hurt  me,  and  against  which  I  am 
unable  to  protect  myself?  "2 

Rousseau  here  supplements  and  corrects  Locke.  For 
one  thing  I  have  ascertained  in  the  case  of  my  own  child, 
and  in  that  of  others,  that  a  fear  of  the  dark  has  grown  up 
when  the  influence  of  the  wicked  nurse  has  been  carefully 
eliminated.  Locke  forgets  that  children  can  get  terrifying 
fancies  from  other  children,  and  from  all  sorts  of  sugges- 
tions, unwittingly  conveyed  by  the  words  of  respectable 
grown  people.  Besides,  he  leaves  untouched  the  question, 
why  children  when  left  alone  'in  the  dark  should  choose 
to  dwell  on  these  fearful  images,  rather  than  on  the  bright 
pretty  ones  which  they  also  acquire.  R.  L.  Stevenson 
has  told  us  how  happy  a  child  can  make  himself  at  night 
with  such  pleasing  fancies.  Yet  it  must  be  owned  that 
darkness  seems  rather  to  favour  images  of  what  is  weird 
and  terrible.  How  is  this  ?  Rousseau  gets  some  way  to- 
wards answering  the  question  by  saying  (as  I  understand 
him  to  say)  that  darkness  breeds  a  sense  of  insecurity. 
I  do  not,  however,  think  that  it  is  the  inconvenience  of 
being  in  the  dark  which  generates  the  fear :  a  child  might, 
I  imagine,  acquire  it  without  ever  having  had  to  explore  a 
dark  place. 

I  strongly  suspect  that  the  fear  of  darkness  takes  its 
rise  in  a  sensuous  phenomenon,  a  kind  of  physical  repug- 
nance. All  sensations  of  very  low  intensity,  as  very  soft 
vocal  sounds,  have  about  them  a  tinge  of  melancholy  > 
a  tristesse,  and  this  is  especially  noticeable  in  the  sensations 

1  Thoughts  on  Education,  sect.  138. 

2  Emile,  book  ii. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  215 

which  the  eye  experiences  when  confronted  with  a  dark 
space,  or,  what  is  tantamount  to  this,  a  black  and  dull 
surface.  The  symbolism  of  darkness  and  blackness,  as 
when  we  talk  of '  gloomy '  thoughts  or  liken  trouble  to  a 
'  black  cloud,'  seems  to  rest  on  this  effect  of  melancholy. 

Along  with  this  gloomy  character  of  the  sensation  of 
dark,  and  not  always  easy  to  distinguish  from  it,  there  goes 
the  craving  of  the  eye  for  its  customary  light,  and  the 
interest  and  the  gladness  which  come  with  seeing.  When 
the  eye  and  brain  are  not  fatigued,  that  is  when  we  are 
wakeful,  this  eye-ache  may  become  an  appreciable  pain  ; 
and  it  is  probable  that  children  feel  the  deprivation  more 
acutely  than  grown  persons,  owing  to  the  abundance  of 
their  visual  activity  as  well  as  to  the  comparatively  scanty 
store  of  their  thought-resources.  Add  to  this  that  darkness, 
by  extinguishing  the  world  of  visible  things,  would  give  to 
a  timid  child  tenacious  of  the  familiar  home-surroundings 
a  peculiarly  keen  sense  of  strangeness  and  of  loneliness,  of 
banishment  from  all  that  he  knows  and  loves.  The  re- 
miniscences of  this  feeling  described  in  later  life  show  that 
it  is  the  sense  of  solitude  which  oppresses  the  child  in  his 
dark  room.1 

This,  I  take  it,  would  be  quite  enough  to  make  the 
situation  of  confinement  in  a  dark  room  disagreeable  and  de- 
pressing to  a  wakeful  child  even  when  he  is  in  bed  and  there 
is  no  restriction  of  bodily  activity.  But  even  this  would 
not  amount  to  a  full  passionate  dread  of  darkness.  It 
seems  to  me  to  be  highly  probable  that  a  baby  of  two  or 
three  months  might  feel  this  vague  depression  and  even 
this  craving  for  the  wonted  scene,  especially  just  after  the 
removal  of  a  light ;  yet  such  a  baby,  as  we  have  seen,  gives 
no  clear  indications  of  fear. 

Fear  of  the  dark  arises  from  the  development  of  the 
child's  imagination,  and  might,  I  believe,  arise  without  any 
suggestion  from  nurse  or  other  children  of  the  notion  that 
1  See  especially  James  Payn,  Gleams  of  Memory,  pp.  3,  4. 


2l6  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

there  are  bogies  in  the  room.  Darkness  is  precisely  the 
situation  most  favourable  to  vivid  imagination  :  the  screen- 
ing of  the  visible  world  makes  the  inner  world  of  fancy  vivid 
and  distinct  by  contrast.  Are  we  not  all  apt  to  shut  our 
eyes  when  we  try  to  '  visualise  '  or  picture  things  very 
distinctly  ?  This  fact  of  a  preternatural  activity  of  imagi- 
nation, taken  with  the  circumstance  emphasised  by  Rousseau 
that  in  the  darkness  the  child  is  no  longer  distinctly 
aware  of  the  objects  that  are  actually  before  him,  would 
help  us  to  understand  why  children  are  so  much  given  to 
projecting  into  the  unseen  black  spaces  the  creatures  of  their 
imagination.  Not  only  so — and  this  Rousseau  does  not 
appear  to  have  recognised — the  dull  feeling  of  depression 
which  accompanies  the  sensation  of  darkness  might  suffice 
to  give  a  gloomy  and  weird  cast  to  the  images  so  projected. 

But  I  am  disposed  to  think  that  there  is  yet  another 
element  in  this  childish  fear.  I  have  said  that  darkness 
gives  a  positive  sensation :  we  see  it,  and  the  sensation,  apart 
from  any  difference  of  signification  which  we  afterwards 
learn  to  give  to  it,  is  of  the  same  kind  that  is  obtained  by 
looking  at  a  dull  black  surface.  To  the  child  the  difference 
between  a  black  object  and  a  dark  unillumined  space  is  as 
yet  not  clear,  and  I  believe  it  will  be  found  that  children 
tend  to  materialise  or  to  'reify'  darkness.  When,  for  ex- 
ample, a  correspondent  tells  me  that  darkness  was  envisaged 
by  her  when  a  child  as  "a  crushing  power,"  I  think  I  see 
traces  of  this  childish  feeling.  I  seem  able  to  recall  my 
own  childish  sense  of  a  big  black  something  on  suddenly 
waking  and  opening  the  eyes  in  a  very  dark  room. 

But  there  is  still  another  thing  to  be  noticed  in  this  sen- 
sation of  darkness.  The  black  field  is  not  uniform  ;  some 
parts  of  it  show  less  black  than  others,  and  the  indistinct 
and  rude  pattern  of  comparatively  light  and  dark  changes 
from  moment  to  moment ;  while  now  and  again  more  de- 
finite spots  of  brightness  may  focus  themselves.  The  vary- 
ing activity  of  the  retina  would  seem  to  account  for  this 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  217 

apparent  changing  of  the  black  scene.  What,  my  reader 
may  not  unnaturally  ask,  has  this  to  do  with  a  child's  fear 
of  the  dark?  If  he  will  recall  what  was  said  about  the 
facility  with  which  a  child  comes  to  see  faces  and  animal 
forms  in  the  lines  of  a  cracked  ceiling,  or  the  veining  of  a 
piece  of  marble,  he  will,  I  think,  recognise  the  drift  of  my 
remarks.  These  slight  and  momentary  differences  in  the 
blackness,  these  fleeting  rudiments  of  a  pattern,  may  serve 
as  a  sensuous  base  for  the  projected  images  ;  the  child  with 
a  strongly  excited  fancy  sees  in  these  dim  traces  of  the 
black  formless  waste  definite  forms.  These  will  naturally 
be  the  forms  with  which  he  is  most  familiar,  and  since  his 
fancy  is  at  the  moment  tinged  with  melancholy  they  will  be 
gloomy  and  disturbing  forms.  Hence  we  may  expect  to 
hear  of  children  seeing  the  forms  of  terrifying  living  things 
in  the  dark. 

Here  is  a  particularly  instructive  case.  A  boy  of  four 
years  had  for  some  time  been  afraid  of  the  dark  and  in- 
dulged by  having  the  candle  left  burning  at  night  On 
hearing  that  the  Crystal  Palace  had  been  burned  down  he 
asked  for  the  first  time  to  have  the  light  taken  away,  fear 
of  the  dark  being  now  cast  out  by  the  bigger  fear  of  fire. 
Some  time  after  this  he  volunteered  an  account  of  his  ob- 
solete terrors  to  his  father.  "Do  you  know,"  he  said,  "what 
I  thought  dark  was  ?  A  great  large  live  thing  the  colour 
of  black  with  a  mouth  and  eyes."  Here  we  have  the  'reify- 
ing '  of  darkness,  and  we  probably  see  the  influence  of  the 
comparatively  bright  spots  in  the  attribution  of  eyes  to  the 
monster,  an  influence  still  more  apparent  in  the  instance 
quoted  above,  where  a  child  saw  the  eyes  of  lions  and  tigers 
glaring  as  they  walked  round  the  room.  Another  suggestive 
instance  here  is  that  given  by  M.  Compayre,  in  which  a  child 
on  being  asked  why  he  did  not  like  to  be  in  a  dark  place 
answered:  "  I  don't  like  chimney-sweeps".1  Here  the  black- 
ness with  its  dim  suggestions  of  brighter  spots  determined 

1  Op.  cit.,  pp.  100,  101. 


2l8  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  image  of  the  black  chimney-sweep  with  his  white  flashes 
of  mouth  and  eyes.1  I  should  like  to  observe  here  paren- 
thetically that  we  still  need  to  learn  from  children  them- 
selves, by  talking  to  them  and  inviting  their  confidence 
when  the  fear  of  the  dark  is  first  noticed,  how  they  are  apt 
to  envisage  it. 

When  imagination  becomes  abnormally  active,  and  the 
child  is  haunted  by  alarming  images,  these  by  recurring 
with  greatest  force  in  the  stillness  and  darkness  of  the  night 
will  add  to  the  terrifying  associations  of  darkness.  This  is 
illustrated  in  the  case  of  the  boy  Stevens,  who  was  haunted 
by  the  spectre  of '  Cocky'  at  night.  Dreams,  especially  of  the 
horrible  nightmare  kind  to  which  nervous  children  are  sub- 
ject, may  invest  the  dark  with  a  new  terror.  A  child  suddenly 
waking  up  and  with  open  eyes  seeing  the  phantom-object  of 
his  dream  against  the  black  background  may  be  forgiven  for 
acquiring  a  dread  of  dark  rooms.  Possibly  this  experience 
gives  the  clue  to  the  observation  already  quoted  of  a  boy 
who  did  not  want  to  sleep  in  a  particular  room  because 
there  were  so  many  dreams  in  it. 

If  the  above  explanation  of  the  child's  fear  of  the  dark 
is  a  sound  one  Rousseau's  prescription  for  curing  it  is  not 
enough.  Children  may  be  encouraged  to  explore  dark 
rooms,  and  by  touching  blind-like  their  various  objects  ren- 
dered familiar  with  the  fact  that  things  remain  unchanged 
even  when  enveloped  in  darkness,  that  the  dark  is  nothing 
but  our  temporary  inability  to  see  things ;  and  this  may  no 
doubt  be  helpful  in  checking  the  fear  when  calm  reflexion 
becomes  possible.  But  a  radical  cure  must  go  farther,  must 
aim  at  checking  the  activity  of  morbid  imagination — and 
here  what  Locke  says  about  the  effects  of  the  terrifying  stories 
of  nurses  is  very  much  to  the  point — and  in  extreme  cases 

1  It  is  supposable  too  that  disturbances  of  the  retina  giving  rise 
to  subjective  luminous  sensations,  as  the  well-known  small  bright 
moving  discs,  might  assist  in  the  case  of  nervous  children  in  suggest- 
ing glaring  eyes. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  2 19 

must  set  about  strengthening  shaky  nerves.  Mothers  would 
do  well  to  remember  that  even  religious  instruction  when 
injudiciously  presented  may  add  to  the  terrors  of  the  dark 
for  these  wee  tremulous  organisms.  One  observation  sent 
me  strongly  suggests  that  a  child  may  take  a  strong  dislike 
to  being  shut  up  in  the  dark  with  the  terrible  all-seeing  God. 

Fears  and  their  Palliatives. 

I  have  probably  illustrated  the  first  fears  of  children  at 
sufficient  length.  Without  trying  to  exhaust  the  subject 
I  have,  I  think,  shown  that  fear  of  a  well-marked  and  in- 
tense kind  is  a  common  feature  of  the  first  years  of  life, 
and  that  it  assumes  a  Protean  variety  of  shapes. 

Much  more  will  no  doubt  have  to  be  done  in  the  way 
of  methodical  observation,  and  more  particularly  statistical 
inquiry  into  the  comparative  frequency  of  the  several  fears, 
the  age  at  which  they  commonly  appear,  and  so  forth, 
before  we  can  build  up  a  theory  of  the  subject.  One  or 
two  general  observations  may,  however,  be  hazarded  even 
at  this  stage. 

The  thing  which  strikes  one  most  perhaps  in  these 
early  fears  is  how  little  they  have  to  do  with  any  remem- 
bered experience  of  evil.  The  child  is  inexperienced,  and 
if  humanely  treated  knows  little  of  the  acuter  forms  of 
human  suffering.  It  would  seem  at  least  as  if  he  feared 
not  because  experience  had  made  him  apprehensive  of 
evil,  but  because  he  was  constitutionally  and  instinctively 
nervous,  and  possessed  with  a  feeling  of  insecurity.  This 
feeling  of  weakness  and  insecurity  comes  to  the  surface  in 
presence  of  what  is  unknown  in  so  far  as  this  can  be 
brought  by  the  child's  mind  into  a  relation  to  his  welfare — 
as  disturbing  noises,  and  the  movements  of  things,  es- 
pecially when  they  take  on  the  form  of  approaches.  The 
same  thing  is,  as  we  have  §een,  illustrated  in  the  fear  of  the 
dark.  A  like  explanation  seems  to  offer  itself  for  other 
common  forms  of  fear,  especially  those  excited  by  others' 


220  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

threats,  as  the  dread  of  the  policeman,  and  little  George 
Sand's  horror  at  the  idea  of  being  shut  up  all  night  in  the 
'  crystal  prison '  of  a  lamp.  The  fact  that  children's  fears 
are  not  the  direct  product  of  experience  is  expressed  other- 
wise by  saying  that  they  are  the  offspring  of  the  imagina- 
tion. A  child  is  apt  to  be  afraid  because  he  fancies  things, 
and  it  will  probably  be  demonstrated  by  statistical  evi- 
dence that  the  most  imaginative  children  (other  things 
being  equal)  are  the  most  subject  to  fear. 

In  certain  of  these  characteristics,  at  least,  children's 
fears  resemble  those  of  animals.  In  both  alike  fear  is 
much  more  an  instinctive  recoil  from  the  unknown  than  an 
apprehension  of  known  evil.  The  shying  of  a  horse,  the 
apparent  fear  of  dogs  at  certain  noises,  probably  too  the 
fear  of  animals  at  the  sight  and  sound  of  fire — so  graphically 
described  by  Mr.  Kipling  in  the  case  of  the  jungle  beasts — 
illustrate  this.  Animals  too  seem  to  have  a  sense  of  the 
uncanny,  when  something  apparently  uncaused  happens, 
as  when  Romanes  excited  fear  in  a  dog  by  attaching  a  fine 
thread  to  a  bone,  and  by  surreptitiously  drawing  it  from 
the  animal,  giving  to  the  bone  the  look  of  self-movement 
The  same  dog  was  frightened  by  soap-bubbles.  According 
to  Romanes,  dogs  are  frightened  by  portraits.  It  is  to  be 
added,  however,  that  in  certain  of  animal  fears  the  influence 
of  heredity  is  clearly  recognisable,  whereas  in  children's 
fears  I  have  regarded  it  as  doubtful.  The  fact  that  a  child 
is  not  frightened  at  fire,  which  terrifies  many  animals,  seems 
to  illustrate  this  difference.1 

Another  instructive  comparison  is  that  of  children's  fears 
with  those  of  savages.  Both  have  a  like  feeling  of  inse- 
curity, and  fall  instinctively  in  presence  of  a  big  unknown 
into  the  attitude  of  dread.  In  the  region  of  superstitious 

1  See  Perez,  L 'Education  des  le  berceau,  pp.  96-99.  On  animal 
fears,  see  further  Romanes,  Animal  Intelligence,  p.  455  f.  ;  Preyer, 
op.  cit.,  p.  127  ff.  and  p.  135  ;  Perez,  First  Three  Years  of  Childhood,  p. 
64  ff. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  221 

fear  more  particularly,  we  see  how  in  both  a  gloomy  fancy 
forestalls  knowledge,  investing  the  new  and  unexplored  with 
alarming  traits. 

Lastly,  children's  fears  have  some  resemblance  to 
certain  abnormal  mental  conditions.  Idiots,  who  are  so 
near  normal  childhood  in  their  degree  of  intelligence,  show 
a  marked  fear  of  strangers.  More  interesting,  however, 
in  the  present  connexion,  is  the  exaggeration  of  the 
childish  fear  of  new  objects  which  shows  itself  in  certain 
mental  aberrations.  There  is  a  characteristic  dread  of 
newness,  neophobia,  just  as  there  is  a  dread  of  water.1 

While,  however,  these  are  the  dominant  characteristics 
of  children's  fears  they  are  not  the  only  ones.  Experience 
begins  to  direct  the  instinctive  fear-impulse  from  the  very 
beginning.  How  much  it  does  in  the  first  months  of  life 
it  is  difficult  to  say.  In  the  aversion  of  a  baby  to  its 
medicine  glass,  or  its  cold  bath,  one  sees,  perhaps,  more  of 
the  rude  germ  of  passion  or  anger  than  of  fear.  Careful 
observations  seem  to  me  to  be  required  on  the  point,  at 
what  definite  date  signs  of  fear  arising  from  experience  of 
pain  begin  to  show  themselves  in  the  child.  Some  children, 
at  least,  have  a  surprising  way  of  not  minding  even  con- 
siderable amounts  of  physical  pain  :  the  misery  of  a  fall,  a 
blow,  a  cut,  and  so  forth,  being  speedily  forgotten.  It 
seems  doubtful,  indeed,  whether  the  venerable  saw,  '  The 
burnt  child  dreads  the  fire,'  is  invariably  true.  It  appears, 
in  many  cases  at  least,  to  take  a  good  amount  of  real 
agony  to  produce  a  genuine  fear  in  a  young  child.2  This 
tendency  to  belittle  pain  is  not  unknown,  I  suspect,  to  the 
tutor  of  small  boys.  It  may  well  be  that  a  definite  and 

1  See  Compayre,  op.  cit.,  pp.  99,  100. 

-  On  this  point  there  are  some  excellent  observations  made  by 
Miss  Shinn,  who  points  out  that  physical  pain  when  not  too  severe  is 
apt  to  be  lost  sight  of  in  the  new  feeling  of  personal  consequence  to 
which  it  gives  rise  (Notes  on  the  Development  of  a  Child,  pt.  ii.,  p. 
144  ff.). 


222  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

precise  recalling  of  the  misery  of  a  scratch,  or  even  of  a 
moderate  burn,  may  not  conduce  to  the  development  of  a 
true  fear,  and  that  here,  too,  fear  when  it  arises  in  all  its 
characteristic  masterfulness  is  at  bottom  fear  of  the  unknown. 
This  seems  illustrated  by  the  well-known  fact  that  a  child 
will  be  more  terrified  during  a  first  experience  of  pain, 
especially  if  there  be  a  visible  hurt  and  bleeding,  than  by 
any  subsequent  prospect  of  a  renewal  of  the  catastrophe. 
Is  not  the  same  thing  true,  indeed,  of  elder  fears  ?  Should 
we  dread  the  wrench  of  a  tooth-extraction  if  it  were  experi- 
enced very  often,  and  we  had  a  sufficiently  photographic 
imagination  to  be  able  to  estimate  precisely  the  intensity 
and  duration  of  the  pain  ? 

Much  the  same  thing  shows  itself  in  the  cases  where 
fear  can  be  clearly  traced  to  experience  and  association. 
In  some  of  these  it  is  no  doubt  remembered  experience 
of  suffering  which  causes  the  fear.  A  child  that  has  been 
seriously  burned  will  unquestionably  be  frightened  at  a  too 
close  approach  of  a  red-hot  poker.  But  in  many  cases  of 
this  excitation  of  fear  by  association  it  is  the  primary  ex- 
perience of  fear  itself  which  seems  to  be  the  real  object  of 
the  apprehension.  Thus  a  child  who  has  been  frightened 
by  a  dog  will  betray  signs  of  fear  at  the  sight  of  a  kennel, 
of  a  picture  of  a  dog,  and  so  forth.  The  little  boy  referred 
to  above  who  was  afraid  of  the  toy  elephant  that  shook  its 
head  showed  signs  of  fear  a  fortnight  afterwards  on  coming 
across  a  picture  of  an  elephant  in  a  picture-book.  In  such 
ways  does  fear  propagate  fear  in  the  timid  little  breast. 

One  cannot  part  from  the  theme  of  children's  fears 
without  a  reference  to  a  closely  connected  subject,  the 
problem  of  their  happiness.  To  ask  whether  childhood  is 
a  happy  time,  still  more  to  ask  whether  it  is  the  happiest,  is 
to  raise  perhaps  a  foolish  and  insoluble  question.  Later 
reminiscences  would  seem  in  this  case  to  be  particularly 
untrustworthy.  Children  themselves  no  doubt  may  have 
very  definite  views  on  the  subject.  A  child  will  tell  you 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  223 

with  the  unmistakable  marks  of  profound  conviction  that 
he  is  so  unhappy.  But  paradoxical  as  it  may  seem,  chil- 
dren really  know  very  little  about  the  matter.  At  the  best 
they  can  only  tell  you  how  they  feel  at  particular  moments. 
To  seek  for  a  precise  and  satisfactory  solution  of  the  prob- 
lem is  thus  futile.  Only  rough  comparisons  of  childhood 
and  later  life  are  possible. 

In  any  such  comparison  the  fears  of  early  years  claim, 
no  doubt,  careful  consideration.  There  seem  to  be  people 
who  have  no  idea  what  the  agony  of  these  early  terrors 
amounts  to.  And  since  it  is  the  unknown  that  excites 
this  fear,  and  the  unknown  in  childhood  is  almost  every- 
thing, the  possibilities  of  suffering  from  this  source  are 
great  enough. 

Alike  the  Good,  the  111  offend  thy  Sight, 
And  rouse  the  stormy  sense  of  shrill  affright. 

George  Sand  hardly  exaggerates  when  she  writes  :  "  Fear 
is,  I  believe,  the  greatest  moral  suffering  of  children  ".  In 
the  case  of  weakly,  nervous  and  imaginative  children,  more 
especially,  this  susceptibility  to  terror  may  bring  miserable 
days  and  yet  more  miserable  nights. 

Nevertheless,  it  is  easy  here  to  pass  from  one  extreme  of 
brutal  indifference  to  another  of  sentimental  exaggeration. 
Childish  suffering  is  terrible  while  it  lasts,  but  happily  it 
has  a  way  of  not  lasting.  The  cruel  distorting  fit  of  terror 
passes  and  leaves  the  little  face  with  its  old  sunny  out-look. 
It  is  to  be  remembered,  too,  that  while  children  are  pitiably 
fearful  in  their  own  way,  they  are,  as  we  have  seen  in  the 
case  of  the  little  Walter  Scott,  delightfully  fearless  also,  as 
judged  by  our  standards.  How  oddly  fear  and  fearlessness 
go  together  is  illustrated  in  a  story  sent  me.  A  little  boy 
fell  into  a  brook.  On  his  being  fished  out  by  his  mother, 
his  sister,  aged  four,  asked  him  :  '  Did  you  see  any  croco- 
diles?' '  No,'  answered  the  boy,  'I  wasn't  in  long  enough.' 


224  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

The  absence  of  fear  of  the  water  itself  was  as  characteristic 
as  the  presence  of  fear  of  the  crocodile. 

It  is  refreshing  to  find  that  in  certain  cases  at  least 
where  older  people  have  done  their  worst  to  excite  terror, 
a  child  has  escaped  its  suffering.  Professor  Barnes  tells  us 
that  a  Californian  child's  belief  in  the  supernatural  takes 
on  a  happy  tone,  directing  itself  to  images  of  heaven  with 
trees,  birds,  and  other  pretty  things,  and  giving  but  little 
heed  to  the  horrors  of  hell.1  In  less  sunny  climes  than 
California  children  may  not,  perhaps,  be  such  little  optim- 
ists, and  it  is  probable  that  graphic  descriptions  of  hell-fire 
have  sent  many  a  creepy  thrill  of  horror  along  a  child's 
tender  nerves.  Still  it  may  be  said  that,  owing  to  the 
fortunate  circumstance  of  children  having  much  less  fear  of 
fire  than  many  animals,  the  misery  in  which  eternal  punish- 
ment is  wont  to  be  bodied  forth  does  not  work  so  power- 
fully as  one  might  expect  on  a  child's  imagination.  The 
author  of  The  Uninitiated  illustrates  a  real  child-trait  when 
she  makes  her  small  heroine  conceive  of  hell  as  a  place  that 
smelt  nastily  (from  its  brimstone) 2  Then  it  is  noticeable 
that  children  in  general  are  but  little  affected  by  fear  at 
the  sight  or  the  thought  of  death.  The  child  C.  had  a 
passing  dread  of  being  buried,  but  his  young  hopeful  heart 
refused  to  credit  the  fact  of  that  far-off  calamity.  Other 
children,  I  find,  dislike  the  idea  of  death  as  threatening  to 
deprive  them  of  their  mother.  Perhaps  they  can  more 
readily  suppose  that  somebody  else  will  die  than  that  they 
themselves  will  do  so.  This  comparative  immunity  from  the 
dread  of  death  is  no  small  deduction  to  be  made  from  the 
burden  of  children's  fear. 

Not  only  so,  when  fear  is  apt  to  be  excited,  Nature  has 
provided  the  small  timorous  person  with  other  instincts 
which  tend  to  mitigate  and  even  to  neutralise  it.  It  is  a 
happy  circumstance  that  the  most  prolific  excitant  of  fear, 
the  presentation  of  something  new  and  uncanny,  is  also 

1  Pedagogical  Review,  ii.,  3,  p.  445.  -  p.  43. 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  22$ 

provocative  of  another  feeling,  that  of  curiosity,  with  its 
impulse  to  look  and  examine.  Even  animals  are  some- 
times divided  in  the  presence  of  something  strange  be- 
tween fear  and  curiosity,1  and  children's  curiosity  is  much 
more  lively  than  theirs.  A  very  tiny  child,  on  first  mak- 
ing acquaintance  with  some  form  of  physical  pain,  as  a 
bump  on  the  head,  will  deliberately  repeat  the  experience 
by  knocking  his  head  against  something  as  if  experiment- 
ing and  watching  the  effect.  A  clearer  case  of  curiosity 
overpowering  fear  is  that  of  a  child  who,  after  pulling  the 
tail  of  a  cat  in  a  bush  and  getting  scratched,  proceeded 
to  dive  into  the  bush  again.2  Still  more  interesting  here 
are  the  gradual  transitions  from  actual  fear  before  the 
new  and  strange  to  bold  inspection.  The  child  who  was 
frightened  by  her  Japanese  doll  insisted  on  seeing  it  every 
day.  The  behaviour  of  one  of  these  small  persons  on  the 
arrival  at  the  house  of  a  strange  dog,  of  a  dark  foreigner, 
or  some  other  startling  novelty,  is  a  pretty  and  amusing 
sight.  The  first  overpowering  timidity,  the  shrinking  back 
to  the  mother's  breast,  followed  by  curious  peeps,  then  by 
bolder  outstretchings  of  head  and  arms,  mark  the  stages  by 
which  curiosity  and  interest  gain  on  fear  and  finally  leave 
it  far  behind.  Very  soon  we  know  the  small  timorous 
creatures  will  grow  into  bold  adventurers.  They  will 
make  playthings  of  the  alarming  animals,  and  of  the 
alarming  shadows  too.3  Later  on  still  perhaps  they  will 
love  nothing  so  much  as  to  probe  the  awful  mysteries  of 
gunpowder. 

One  palliative  of  these  early  terrors  remains  to  be 
touched  on,  the  instinct  of  sheltering  or  refuge-taking. 
The  first  manifestations  of  what  is  called  the  social  nature 

1  Some  examples  are  given  by  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  p.  135. 

2  Miss  Shinn,  op.  cit.,  p.  150. 

3  Stevenson,  the  same  who  has  described  the  terrors  of  moving 
shadows,  illustrates  how  a  child   may  make  a  sort  of  playfellow  of 
his  shadow  (A  Child's  Garden  of  Verses,  xviii.). 

IS 


226  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

of  children  are  little  more  than  the  reverse  side  of  their 
timidity.  A  baby  will  cease  crying  at  night  on  hearing  the 
familiar  voice  of  mother  or  nurse  because  a  vague  sense  of 
human  companionship  does  away  with  the  misery  of  the 
black  solitude.  A  frightened  child  probably  knows  an 
ecstasy  of  bliss  when  folded  in  the  protective  embrace  of 
a  mother's  arms.  Even  the  most  timid  children  never 
have  the  full  experience  of  terror  so  long  as  there  is  within 
reach  the  secure  base  of  all  their  reconnoitring  excursions, 
the  mother's  skirts.  Happy  those  little  ones  who  have  ever 
near  them  loving  arms  within  whose  magic  circle  the  on- 
coming of  the  cruel  fit  of  terror  is  instantly  checked,  giving 
place  to  a  delicious  calm. 

How  unhappy  those  children  must  be  who,  being 
fearsome  by  nature,  lack  this  refuge,  who  are  left  much 
alone  to  wrestle  with  their  horrors  as  best  they  may,  and 
are  rudely  repulsed  when  they  bear  their  heart-quakings  to 
others,  I  would  not  venture  to  say.  Still  less  should  I 
care  to  suggest  what  is  suffered  by  those  unfortunates  who 
find  in  those  about  them  not  comfort,  assurance,  support  in 
their  fearsome  moments,  but  the  worst  source  of  their 
terrors.  To  be  brutal  to  these  small  sensitive  organisms,  to 
practise  on  their  terrors,  to  take  delight  in  exciting  the 
wild  stare  and  wilder  shriek  of  terror,  this  is  perhaps  one  of 
the  strange  things  which  make  one  believe  in  the  old  dogma 
that  the  devil  can  enter  into  men  and  women.  For  here 
we  seem  to  have  to  do  with  a  form  of  cruelty  so  exquisite, 
so  contrary  to  the  oldest  of  instincts,  that  it  is  dishonouring 
to  the  savage  and  to  the  lower  animals  to  attempt  to  refer 
it  to  heredity. 

To  dwell  on  such  things,  however,  would  be  to  go  back 
to  a  pessimistic  view  of  childhood.  It  is  undeniable  that 
children  are  exposed  to  indescribable  misery  when  they 
are  delivered  into  the  hands  of  a  consummately  cruel 
guardian.  Yet  one  may  hope  that  this  sort  of  person 
is  exceptional,  something  of  which  we  can  give  no  ac- 


SUBJECT   TO   FEAR.  22/ 

<:ount  save  by  saying  that  now  and  again  in  sport  nature 
produces  a  monster,  as  if  to  show  what  she  could  do  if  she 
did  not  choose  more  wisely  and  benignly  to  work  within 
the  limitations  of  type. 


228 


VII. 

RAW  MATERIAL  OF  MORALITY. 
Primitive  Egoism. 

PERHAPS  there  has  been  more  hasty  theorising  about  the 
child's  moral  characteristics  than  about  any  other  of  his 
attributes.  The  very  fact  that  diametrically  opposed  views 
have  been  put  forward  is  suggestive  of  this  haste.  By 
certain  theologians  and  others  infancy  has  been  painted  in 
the  blackest  of  moral  colours.  According  to  M.  Compayre 
it  is  a  bachelor,  La  Bruyere,  and  a  bishop,  Dupanloup,  who 
have  said  the  worst  things  of  children  ;  and  the  parent  or 
teacher  who  wants  to  see  how  bad  this  worst  is  may  consult 
M.  Compayre's  account.1  On  the  other  hand,  Rousseau  and 
those  who  think  with  him  have  invested  the  child  with  an 
untarnished  purity.  According  to  Rousseau  the  child  comes 
from  the  Creator's  hand  a  perfect  bit  of  workmanship,, 
which  blundering  man  at  once  begins  to  mar.  Children's 
freedom  from  human  vices  has  been  a  common  theme  of 
the  poet :  their  innocence  was  likened  by  M.  About  to  the 
spotless  snow  of  the  Jungfrau.  Others,  as  Wordsworth, 
have  gone  farther  and  attributed  to  the  infant  positive 
excellences,  glimpses  of  a  higher  morality  than  ours,. 
Divine  intuitions  brought  from  a  prenatal  existence. 

Such  opposite  views  of  the  moral  status  and  worth  of  a 
child  must  be  the  result  of  prepossession,  and  the  magnifying 
of  the  accidents  of  individual  experience.  A  theologian  who- 

1  L 'Evolution  intell.  et  mor.  de  I' Enfant,  chap,  xiv.,  ii. 


RAW   MATERIAL   OF   MORALITY.  2 29 

is  concerned  to  maintain  the  doctrine  of  natural  depravity, 
or  a  bachelor  who  happens  to  have  known  children  chiefly 
in  the  character  of  little  tormentors,  may  be  expected  to 
paint  childhood  with  black  pigments.  On  the  other  hand 
the  poet,  attracted  by  the  charm  of  infancy,  may,  as  we  have 
seen,  easily  be  led  to  idealise  its  moral  aspects. 

The  first  thing  that  strikes  one  in  all  such  attempts  to 
fix  the  moral  worth  of  the  child  is  that  they  are  judging  of 
things  by  wrong  standards.  The  infant,  though  it  has  a 
nature  capable  of  becoming  moral  or  immoral,  is  not  as  yet 
a  moral  being  ;  and  there  is  a  certain  impertinence  in  trying 
to  force  it  under  our  categories  of  good  and  bad,  pure  and 
corrupt. 

If  then  we  would  know  what  the  child's  '  moral '  nature 
is  like  we  must  be  careful  to  distinguish.  By  '  moral '  we 
must  understand  that  part  of  his  nature,  feelings  and 
impulses,  which  has  for  us  a  moral  significance ;  whether 
as  furnishing  raw  material  out  of  which  education  may 
develop  virtuous  dispositions,  or  contrariwise,  as  constitut- 
ing forces  adverse  to  this  development.  It  may  be  well  to 
-call  the  former  tendencies  favourable  to  virtue,  pro-moral, 
those  unfavourable,  contra-moral.  Our  inquiry,  then,  must 
be  :  In  what  respects,  and  to  what  extent,  does  the  child 
show  himself  by  nature,  apart  from  all  that  is  meant  by  educa- 
tion, pro-moral  or  contra-moral,  that  is,  well  or  ill  fitted  to 
become  a  member  of  a  good  or  virtuous  community  and  to 
exercise  what  we  know  as  moral  functions  ? 

Our  especial  object  here  will  be  if  possible  to  get  at 
natural  dispositions,  to  examine  the  child  in  his  primitive 
nakedness,  looking  out  for  those  instinctive  tendencies 
which  according  to  modern  science  are  only  a  little  less 
clearly  marked  in  the  young  of  our  own  species  than  in  a 
puppy  or  a  chick. 

Now  there  is  clearly  a  difficulty  here.  How,  it  may 
be  asked,  can  we  expect  to  find  in  a  child  any  traits  having 
a  moral  significance  which  have  not  been  developed  by 


230  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

social  influences  and  education  ?  In  the  case  of  pro-moral 
dispositions  more  particularly,  as  kindness,  or  truthfulness, 
we  cannot  expect  to  get  rid  of  the  effect  of  the  combined 
personal  influence  and  instruction  of  the  mother,  which  is 
of  the  essence  of  all  moral  training.  Even  with  regard 
to  contra-moral  traits,  as  rudeness,  or  lying,  it  is  evident 
that  example  is  frequently  a  co-operating  influence. 

The  difficulty  is  no  doubt  a  real  one,  and  cannot  be 
wholly  got  rid  of.  We  cannot  completely  eliminate  the 
influence  of  the  common  life  in  which  the  good  and  bad 
disposition  alike  may  be  said  to  grow  up.  Yet  we  may 
distinguish.  Thus  we  may  look  out  for  the  earliest  spon- 
taneous and  what  we  may  call  original  manifestations  of 
such  dispositions  as  affection  and  truthfulness,  so  as  to 
eliminate  the  direct  action  of  instruction  and  example,  and 
thus  to  reduce  the  influence  of  the  social  medium  on  the  child 
to  a  minimum.  Similarly  in  the  case  of  brutal  and  other 
unlovely  propensities,  we  may  by  taking  pains  get  rid  of 
the  influence  of  bad  example. 

Let  us  see,  then,  how  far  the  indictment  of  the  child  is 
a  just  one.  Do  children  tend  spontaneously  to  manifest 
the  germs  of  vicious  dispositions,  and  if  so,  to  what  extent  ? 
Here,  as  I  have  suggested,  we  must  be  particularly  careful 
not  to  read  wrong  interpretations  into  what  we  see.  It  will 
not  do,  for  example,  to  say  that  children  are  born  thieves 
because  they  show  themselves  at  first  serenely  indifferent 
to  the  distinction  of  meunt  and  tuum,  and  are  inclined  to 
help  themselves  to  other  children's  toys,  and  so  forth.  To 
repeat,  what  we  have  to  inquire  is  whether  children  by 
their  instinctive  inclinations  are  contra-moral,  that  is,  pre- 
disposed to  what,  if  persevered  in  with  reflexion,  we  call 
immorality  or  vice. 

Here  we  cannot  do  better  than  touch  on  that  group  of 
feelings  and  dispositions  which  can  be  best  marked  off  as 
anti-social  since  they  tend  to  the  injury  of  others,  such  as 
anger,  envy,  and  cruelty. 


RAW   MATERIAL   OF   MORALITY.  231 

The  most  distant  acquaintance  with  the  first  years  of 
human  life  tells  us  that  young  children  have  much  in  common 
with  the  lower  animals.  Their  characteristic  passions  and  im- 
pulses are  centred  in  self  and  the  satisfaction  of  its  wants. 
What  is  better  marked,  for  example,  than  the  boundless 
greed  of  the  child,  his  keen  desire  to  appropriate  and  enjoy 
whatever  presents  itself,  and  to  resent  others'  participation 
in  such  enjoyment  ?  For  some  time  after  birth  the  child 
is  little  more  than  an  incarnation  of  appetite  which  knows 
on  restraint,  and  only  yields  to  the  undermining  force  of 
satiety. 

The  child's  entrance  into  social  life  through  a  growing 
consciousness  of  the  existence  of  others  is  marked  by  much 
fierce  opposition  to  their  wishes.  His  greed,  which  at  the 
outset  was  but  the  expression  of  a  vigorous  nutritive 
impulse,  now  takes  on  more  of  a  contra-moral  aspect.  The 
removal  of  the  feeding-bottle  before  full  satisfaction  has 
been  attained  is,  as  we  know,  the  occasion  for  one  of  the 
most  impressive  utterances  of  the  baby's  '  will  to  live,'  and 
of  its  resentment  of  all  human  checks  to  its  native  impulses. 
In  this  outburst  we  have  the  first  rude  germ  of  that  defiance 
of  control  and  of  authority  of  which  I  shall  have  to  say 
more  by-and-by. 

In  another  way,  too,  the  expansion  of  the  infant's  con- 
sciousness through  the  recognition  of  others  widens  the 
terrain  of  greedy  impulse.  For  ugly  envy  commonly  has 
its  rise  in  the  perception  of  another  child's  consumption  of 
appetite's  dainties. 

Here,  it  is  evident,  we  are  still  at  the  level  of  the  animal. 
A  dog  is  passionately  greedy  like  the  child,  will  fiercely 
resent  any  interference  with  the  satisfaction  of  its  appetite, 
and  will  be  envious  of  another  and  more  fortunately  placed 
animal. 

Much  the  same  concern  for  self  and  opposition  to  others' 
having  what  the  child  himself  desires  shows  itself  in  the 
matter  of  toys  and  other  possessions  of  interest.  A  child 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

is  apt  not  only  to  make  free  with  another  child's  toys,  but 
to  show  the  strongest  objection  to  any  imitation  of  this 
freedom,  often  displaying  a  dog-in-the-manger  spirit  by 
refusing  to  lend  what  he  himself  does  not  want.  Not  only 
so,  he  will  be  apt  to  resent  another  child's  having  toys  of 
his  own.  This  envy  of  other  children's  possessions  is  often 
wide  and  profound. 

As  the  social  interests  come  into  play  so  far  as  to  make 
caresses  and  other  signs  of  affection  sources  of  pleasure  to 
the  child,  the  field  for  envy  and  its  '  green-eyed  '  offspring, 
jealousy,  is  still  more  enlarged.  As  is  well  known,  an  in- 
fant will  greatly  resent  the  mother's  taking  another  child 
into  her  arms. 

Here,  again,  we  are  at  the  level  of  the  lower  animals. 
They,  too,  as  our  dogs  and  cats  can  show  us,  can  be  envious 
not  only  in  the  matter  of  eatables,  but  in  that  of  human 
caressings,  and  even  of  possessions — witness  the  behaviour 
of  two  dogs  when  a  stick  is  thrown  into  the  water. 

Full  illustrations  of  these  traits  of  the  first  years  of  child- 
hood are  not  needed.  We  all  know  them.  M.  Perez  and 
others  have  culled  a  sufficient  collection  of  examples.1 

Out  of  all  this  unrestrained  pushing  of  appetite  and 
desire  whereby  the  child  comes  into  rude  collision  with 
others'  wants,  wishes  and  purposes,  there  issue  the  well- 
known  passionateness,  the  angry  outbursts,  and  the  fierce 
quarrellings  of  the  child.  These  fits  of  angry  passion  or 
temper  are  among  the  most  curious  manifestations  of  child- 
hood, and  deserve  to  be  studied  with  much  greater  care 
than  they  have  yet  received. 

The  outburst  of  rage  as  the  imperious  little  will  feels 
itself  suddenly  pulled  up  has  in  spite  of  its  comicality 
something  impressive.  Hitting  out  right  and  left,  throwing 
things  down  on  the  floor  and  breaking  them,  howling,  wild 
agitated  movements  of  the  arms  and  whole  body,  these 

1  See  for  example  Perez,  The  First  Three  Years  of  Childhood,  p.  66 
if.  ;  and  L'Education  des  le  berceau,  chap.  vi. 


RAW   MATERIAL   OF   MORALITY.  233 

are  the  outward  vents  which  the  gust  of  childish  fury  is 
apt  to  take.  Preyer  observed  one  of  these  violent  explosions 
in  the  seventeenth  month.  The  outburst  tends  to  concen- 
trate itself  in  an  attack  on  the  offender,  be  this  even  the  be- 
loved mamma  herself.  Darwin's  boy  at  the  age  of  two  years 
three  months  became  a  great  adept  at  throwing  books,  sticks, 
etc.,  at  any  one  who  offended  him.1  But  almost  anything  will 
do  as  an  object  of  attack.  A  child  of  four  on  being  crossed 
would  bang  his  chair,  and  then  proceed  to  vent  his  dis- 
pleasure on  his  unoffending  toy  lion,  banging  him,  jumping 
on  him,  and,  as  anti-climax,  threatening  him  with  the  loss 
of  his  dinner.  Hitting  is  in  some  cases  improved  upon  by 
biting.  The  boy  C.  was  for  some  time  vigorously  mordant 
in  his  angry  fits.  Another  little  boy  would,  under  similar 
circumstances,  bite  the  carpet. 

Here  we  have  expressive  movements  which  are  plainly 
brutal,  which  assimilate  the  aspect  of  an  angry  child  to 
that  of  an  infuriated  animal.  The  whole  outward  attitude 
is  one  of  fierce  reckless  assault.  The  insane,  we  are  told, 
manifest  a  like  wildness  of  attack  in  fits  of  anger,  smashing 
windows,  etc.,  and  striking  anybody  who  happens  to  be  at 
hand. 

Yet  these  are  not  all  the  manifestations.  Childish  anger 
has  its  wretched  aspect.  There  is  keen  suffering  in  these 
early  experiences  of  thwarted  will  and  purpose.  A  little 
boy,  rather  more  than  a  year  old,  used  when  crossed  to 
throw  himself  on  the  floor  and  bang  the  back  of  his  head  ; 
and  his  brother,  when  fourteen  months  old,  would  similarly 
throw  himself  on  the  floor,  bang  the  back  of  his  head,  biting 
the  carpet  as  before  mentioned.  This  act  of  throwing  one- 
self on  the  floor,  which  is  common  about  this  age  and 
is  apparently  quite  instinctive,  is  the  expression  of  the  utter 
dejection  of  misery.  C.'s  attitude  when  crossed,  gathered 

1  Darwin  notes  that  all  his  boys  did  this  kind  of  thing,  whereas 
his  girls  did  not  (Mind,  ii.,  p.  288).  My  own  observations  agree  with 
this.  A  small  boy  has  more  of  savage  attack  than  a  small  girl. 


234  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

into  a  heap  on  the  floor,  was  eloquent  of  this  infantile 
despair.  Such  suffering  is  the  immediate  outcome  of 
thwarted  purpose,  and  must  be  distinguished  from  the 
moral  feeling  of  shame  which  often  accompanies  it. 

Such  stormy  outbursts  vary  no  doubt  from  child  to 
child.  Thus  C.'s  sister  in  her  angry  moments  did  not  bite 
or  roll  on  the  floor,  but  would  dance  about  and  stamp. 
Some  children  show  little  if  anything  of  this  savage  furious- 
ness.  Among  those  that  do  show  it,  it  is  often  a  temporary 
phenomenon  only. 

This  anger,  it  is  to  be  noted,  is  due  to  check,  and  would 
show  itself  to  some  extent  even  if  there  were  no  inter- 
vention of  authority.  Thus  a  child  will  become  angry, 
resentful,  and  despairingly  miserable  if  another  child  gets 
effective  hold  of  something  which  he  wants  to  have.  Yet  it 
is  undoubtedly  true,  as  we  shall  see,  that  these  little  storms 
are  most  frequently  called  up  by  the  imposition  of  authority, 
and  are  a  manifestation  of  what  we  call  a  defiant  attitude. 

This  slight  examination  may  suffice  to  show  that  with 
the  child  self,  its  appetites,  its  satisfactions,  are  the  centre  of 
its  existence,  the  pivot  on  which  its  action  turns.  I  do  not 
forget  the  real  and  striking  differences  here,  the  specially 
brutal  form  of  boys'  anger  as  compared  with  that  of  girls, 
the  partial  atrophy  of  some  of  these  impulses,  e.g.,  jealousy, 
in  the  more  gentle  and  affectionate  type  of  child.  Yet 
there  seems  to  be  little  doubt  that  these  are  among  the 
commonest  and  most  pronounced  characteristics  of  the  first 
years. 

Evolution  will,  no  doubt,  help  us  to  understand  much  of 
this.  If  the  order  of  development  of  the  individual  follows 
and  summarises  that  of  the  race,  we  should  expect  the 
child  to  show  a  germ  at  least  of  the  passionateness,  the 
quarrelsomeness  of  the  brute  and  of  the  savage  before  he 
shows  the  moral  qualities  distinctive  of  civilised  man.  That 
he  often  shows  so  close  a  resemblance  to  the  savage  and  to 
the  brute  suggests  how  little  ages  of  civilised  life  with  its 


RAW    MATERIAL   OF    MORALITY.  235 

suppression  of  these  furious  impulses  have  done  to  tone 
down  the  ancient  and  carefully  transmitted  instincts.  The 
child  at  birth,  and  for  a  long  while  after,  may  then  be  said 
to  be  the  representative  of  wild  untamed  nature,  which  it  is 
for  education  to  subdue  and  fashion  into  something  higher 
and  better. 

At  the  same  time  the  child  is  more  than  this.  In  this 
first  clash  of  his  will  with  another's  he  knows  more  than 
the  brute's  sensual  fury.  He  suffers  consciously,  he  realises 
himself  in  his  antagonism  to  a  world  outside  him.  It  is 
probable,  as  I  have  pointed  out  before,  that  even  a  physical 
check  bringing  pain,  as  when  the  child  runs  his  head 
against  a  wall,  may  develop  this  consciousness  of  self  in 
its  antagonism  to  a  not-self.  This  consciousness  reaches 
a  higher  phase  when  the  opposing  force  is  distinctly  ap- 
prehended as  another  will.  Self-feeling,  a  germ  of  the  feeling 
of  '  my  worth,'  enters  into  this  early  passionateness  and 
differentiates  it  from  a  mere  animal  rage.  The  absolute 
prostration  of  infantile  anger  seems  to  be  the  expression 
of  this  keen  consciousness  of  rebuff,  of  injury. 

While,  then,  these  outbursts  of  savage  instinct  in 
children  are  no  doubt  ugly,  and  in  their  direction  contra- 
moral,  they  must  not  hastily  be  pronounced  wholly  bad 
and  wicked.  To  call  them  wicked  in  the  full  sense  of  that 
term  is  indeed  to  forget  that  they  are  the  swift  reactions  of 
instinct  which  have  in  them  nothing  of  reflexion  or  of 
deliberation.  The  angry  child  venting  his  spite  in  some 
wild  act  of  violence  is  a  long  way  from  a  man  who  know- 
ingly and  with  the  consent  of  his  will  retaliates  and  hates. 
The  very  fleeting  character  of  the  outbreak,  the  rapid  sub- 
sidence of  passion  and  transition  to  another  mood,  show 
that  there  is  here  no  real  malice  prepense.  These  instincts 
will,  no  doubt,  if  they  are  not  tamed,  develop  later  on  into 
truly  wicked  dispositions  ;  yet  it  is  by  no  means  a  small 
matter  to  recognise  that  they  do  not  amount  to  full  moral 
depravity. 


236  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  have  seen  that  we  do  not  render 
complete  justice  to  these  early  manifestations  of  angry- 
passion  if  we  class  them  with  those  of  the  brute.  The  child 
in  these  first  years,  though  not  yet  human  in  the  sense  of 
having  rational  insight  into  his  wrong-doing,  is  human  in 
the  sense  of  suffering  through  consciousness  of  an  injured 
self.  This  reflective  element  is  not  yet  moral  ;  the  sense 
of  injury  may  turn  by-and-by  into  lasting  hatred.  Yet  it 
holds  within  itself  possibilities  of  something  higher.  But 
of  this  more  when  we  come  to  envisage  the  child  in  his 
relation  to  authority. 

The  same  predominance  of  self,  the  same  kinship  with 
the  unsocial  brute  which  shows  itself  in  these  germinal 
animosities,  is  said  to  reappear  in  the  insensibility  or  un- 
feelingness  of  children.  The  commonest  charge  against 
children  from  those  who  are  not  on  intimate  terms  with 
them,  and  sometimes,  alas,  from  those  who  are,  is  that  they 
are  heartless  and  cruel. 

That  children  often  appear  to  the  adult  as  unfeeling 
as  a  stone,  is,  I  suppose,  incontestable.  The  troubles 
which  harass  and  oppress  the  mother  leave  her  small 
companion  quite  unconcerned.  He  either  goes  on  play- 
ing with  undisturbed  cheerfulness,  or  he  betrays  a  mo- 
mentary curiosity  about  some  circumstance  connected 
with  the  affliction  which  is  worse  than  the  absorption  in 
play  through  its  tantalising  want  of  any  genuine  feeling. 
A  brother  or  a  sister  may  be  ill,  but  if  the  vigorous  little 
player  is  affected  at  all,  it  is  only  through  the  loss  of  his 
companion,  if  this  is  not  more  than  made  up  for  by  certain 
advantages  of  the  solitary  situation.  If  the  mother  is  ill, 
the  event  is  interesting  merely  as  supplying  him  with 
new  treats.  A  little  boy  of  four,  after  spending  half  an 
hour  in  his  mother's  sick-room,  coolly  informed  his  nurse  : 
'  I  have  had  a  very  nice  time,  mamma's  ill  ! '  The  order  of 
the  two  statements  is  significant  of  the  child's  mental 
attitude  towards  others'1  sufferings.  If  his  faithful  nurse 


RAW   MATERIAL   OF   MORALITY.  237 

has  her  face  bandaged,  his  interest  in  her  torments  does  not  go 
beyond  a  remark  on  the  '  funniness  '  of  her  new  appearance. 

When  it  comes  to  the  bigger  human  troubles  this  want 
of  fellow-feeling  is  still  more  noticeable.  Nothing  is  more 
shocking  to  the  adult  observer  of  children  than  their 
coldness  and  stolidity  in  presence  of  death.  While  a 
whole  house  is  stricken  with  grief  at  the  loss  of  a  beloved 
inmate  the  child  is  wont  to  preserve  his  serenity,  being 
affected  at  most  by  a  feeling  of  awe  before  a  great  mystery. 
Even  the  sight  of  the  dead  body  does  not  always  excite 
grief.  Mrs.  Burnett  in  her  interesting  reminiscences  of 
childhood  has  an  excellent  account  of  the  feelings  of  a 
sensitive  and  refined  child  when  first  brought  face  to  face 
with  death.  In  one  case  she  was  taken  with  fearsome 
longing  to  touch  the  dead  body,  so  as  to  know  what 
'as  cold  as  death'  meant,  in  another,  that  of  a  pretty  girl  of 
three  with  golden  brown  eyes  and  neat  small  brown  curls, 
she  was  impressed  by  the  loveliness  of  the  whole  scene, 
the  nursery  bedroom  being  hung  with  white  and  adorned 
with  white  flowers.  In  neither  case  was  she  sorry,  and  could 
not  cry  though  she  had  imagined  beforehand  that  she  would.1 
Even  in  this  case,  then,  where  so  much  feeling  was  called 
forth,  commiseration  for  the  dead  companion  seems  to 
have  been  almost  wholly  wanting.2 

No  one,  I  think,  will  doubt  that  judged  by  our  standards 
children  are  often  profoundly  and  shockingly  callous.  But 
the  question  arises  here,  too,  whether  we  are  right  in 
applying  our  grown-up  standards.  It  is  one  thing  to  be 
indifferent  with  full  knowledge  of  suffering,  another  to  be 
indifferent  in  the  sense  in  which  a  cat  might  be  said  to 
be  so  at  the  spectacle  of  your  falling  or  burning  your 
finger.  We  are  apt  to  assume  that  children  know  our 
sufferings  instinctively,  or  at  least  that  they  can  always 
enter  into  them  when  they  are  openly  expressed.  But  this 

1  The  One  I  Knew  Best,  chap.  x. 

2  Cf.  Paola  Lombroso,  op.  cit.,  p.  84  f. 


238  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

assumption  is  highly  unreasonable.  A  large  part  of  the 
manifestation  of  human  suffering  is  unintelligible  to  a 
little  child.  He  is  oppressed  neither  by  our  anxieties  nor 
by  our  griefs,  just  because  these  are  to  a  large  extent 
beyond  his  sympathetic  comprehension. 

We  must  remember,  too,  that  there  are  moods  and 
attitudes  of  mind  favourable  and  unfavourable  to  sym- 
pathy. None  of  us  are  uniformly  and  consistently  com- 
passionate, and  children  are  frequently  the  subject  of 
moods  which  exclude  the  feeling.  They  are  impelled  by 
their  superabundant  nervous  energy  to  wild  romping 
activity,  they  are  passionately  absorbed  in  their  play, 
they  are  intensely  curious  about  the  many  new  things 
they  see  and  hear  of.  These  dominant  impulses  issue  in 
mental  attitudes  which  are  indifferent  to  the  spectacle  of 
others'  troubles. 

Again,  where  an  appeal  to  serious  attention  is  given,  a 
child  is  apt  to  spy  something  besides  the  sadness.  The 
little  girl  already  spoken  of  saw  the  prettiness  of  the  death- 
room  rather  than  its  mournfulness.  A  teacher  once  told 
her  class  of  the  death  of  a  class-mate.  There  was  of  course 
a  strange  stillness,  which  one  little  girl  presently  broke 
with  a  loud  laugh.  The  child  is  said  to  have  been  by  no 
means  unemotional,  and  the  laugh  not  a  '  nervous '  one. 
The  odd  situation — the  sudden  hush  of  a  class — had  affected 
childish  sensibilities  more  than  the  distressing  announcement. 

One  other  remark  by  way  of  saving  clause  here.  It  is 
by  no  means  true  that  children  are  always  unaffected  by 
the  sad  and  sorrowful  things  in  life.  The  first  acquaintance 
with  death,  as  we  know  from  a  number  of  published  reminis- 
cences, has  sometimes  shaken  a  child's  whole  being  with 
an  infinite,  nameless  sense  of  woe.1 

1  See,  for  example,  the  record  of  the  impression  produced  by  a 
parent's  death  left  by  Steele  in  the  Tatler,  and  George  Sand  in 
her  autobiography.  No  doubt,  as  Tolstoi's  reminiscences  tell  us, 
a  good  deal  of  straining  after  emotion  and  vain  affectation  may 
mingle  with  such  childish  sorrow. 


RAW   MATERIAL   OF   MORALITY.  239 

Children,  says  the  misopaedist,  are  not  only  unfeeling 
where  we  look  for  sympathy  and  kindness,  they  are  posi- 
tively unkind,  their  unkindness  amounting  to  cruelty.  What 
\ve  mean  by  the  brute  in  the  child  is  emphatically  this 
cruelty.  By  cruelty  is  here  understood  cold-blooded  in- 
fliction of  pain.  "  Get  age,"  wrote  La  Fontaine  of  child- 
hood, "  est  sans  pitie."  The  idea  that  children,  especially 
boys,  are  cruel  in  this  sense  is,  I  think,  a  common  one. 

This  cruelty  will  now  and  again  show  itself  in  relation 
to  other  children.  One  of  the  trying  situations  of  early 
life  is  to  find  oneself  supplanted  by  the  arrival  of  a  new 
baby.  Children,  I  have  reason  to  think,  are,  in  such  cir- 
cumstances, capable  of  coming  shockingly  near  to  a  feeling 
of  hatred.  I  have  heard  of  one  little  girl  who  was  taken 
with  so  violent  an  antipathy  to  a  baby  which  she  considered 
outrageously  ugly  as  to  make  attempts  to  smash  its  head, 
much  as  she  would  no  doubt  have  tried  to  destroy  a  doll 
which  had  become  unsightly  to  her.  The  baby,  it  is  com- 
forting to  know,  was  not  really  hurt  by  this  precocious 
explosion  of  infanticidal  impulse — perhaps  the  smashing 
was  more  than  half  a  "pretence" — and  the  little  girl  has 
since  grown  up  to  be  a  kind-hearted  woman. 

Such  cruel-looking  handling  of  smaller  infants  is  pro- 
bably rare.  More  common  is  the  exhibition  of  the  signs 
of  cruelty  in  the  child's  dealings  with  animals.  It  is  of 
this,  indeed,  that  we  mostly  think  when  we  speak  of  a 
child's  cruelty. 

At  first  nothing  seems  clearer  than  the  evidence  of 
malicious  intention  in  a  child's  treatment  of  animals.  The 
little  girl  M.  when  just  a  year  old  would  lift  two  kittens  by 
the  neck  and  try  to  stamp  on  them.  The  little  girl  described 
by  Miss  Shinn  would  when  two  years  old  run  up  to  a  dog 
and  jerk  his  ear  till  he  snapped  at  her,  and  on  one  occasion 
resolutely  thrust  her  hand  into  a  bush  to  seize  pussy,  mind- 
ing not  the  scratches.1  Do  we  not  see  in  this  mauling  of 

1  Notes  on  the  Development  of  a  Child,  pi.  ii.,  p.  149  f. 


240  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

animals,  even  when  it  brings  the  child  himself  pain,  evi- 
dences of  a  rooted  determination  to  plague,  and  of  a  fierce 
delight  in  plaguing? 

The  question  of  the  innermost  nature  of  human  cruelty 
is  top  difficult  a  one  to  be  discussed  here.  I  will  only  say 
that  whatever  the  cruelty  of  adults  may  be  children's  so- 
called  cruelty  towards  animals  is  very  far  from  being  a 
pure  delight  in  the  sight  of  suffering.  The  torments  to 
which  a  child  will  subject  a  long-suffering  cat  are,  I  sus- 
pect, due  not  to  a  clear  intention  to  inflict  pain,  but  to  the 
childish  impulse  to  hold,  possess,  and  completely  dominate 
the  pet  animal.  He  feels  he  must  have  the  pet,  no  matter 
at  what  cost  to  himself:  of  the  cost  to  his  victim  he  does 
not  think.  The  stamping  on  the  kittens  was  perhaps 
merely  a  childish  way  of  holding  them  fast.  Such  actions 
are  a  manifestation  of  that  odd  mixture  of  sociability  and 
love  of  power  which  makes  up  a  child's  attachment  to  the 
lower  animals. 

The  case  of  destructive  cruelty,  as  when  a  small  boy 
crushes  a  fly,  is  somewhat  different.  Let  me  give  a  well- 
observed  instance.  A  little  boy  of  two  years  and  two 
months,  "after  nearly  killing  a  fly  on  the  window-pane, 
seemed  surprised  and  disturbed,  looking  round  for  an  ex- 
planation, then  gave  it  himself:  '  Mr.  Fy  dom  (gone)  to 
by-by  '.  But  he  would  not  touch  it  or  another  fly  again — 
a  doubt  evidently  remained  and  he  continued  uneasy  about 
it."  Here  we  have,  I  think,  the  instinctive  attitude  of  a 
child  towards  the  outcome  of  his  destructive  impulse. 
This  impulse,  which,  as  we  know,  becomes  more  clearly 
destructive  when  experience  has  taught  what  result  will 
follow,  is  not  necessarily  cruel  in  the  sense  of  including  an 
idea  of  the  animal's  suffering.  Animal  movement,  especially 
that  of  tiny  things,  has  something  exciting  and  provoking 
about  it.  The  child's  own  activity  and  the  love  of  power 
which  is  bound  up  with  it  impel  him  to  arrest  the  move- 
ments of  small  manageable  things.  This  is  the  meaning, 


RAW    MATERIAL   OF    MORALITY.  241 

I  suspect,  of  the  fascination  of  the  fly  on  the  window-pane, 
and  of  tiny  creeping  things,  and  especially,  perhaps,  of  the 
worm  with  its  tangle  of  wriggling  movement.  The  cat's 
prolonged  chase  of  the  mouse,  into  which,  as  we  have  seen, 
something  of  a  dramatic  make-believe  enters,  probably 
owes  its  zest  to  a  like  delight  in  the  realisation  of  power. 

Along  with  this  love  of  power  there  goes  often  some- 
thing of  a  child's  fierce  untamable  curiosity.  A  boy  of 
four,  finding  that  his  mother  was  shocked  at  hearing  him 
express  a  wish  to  see  a  pigeon  which  a  dog  had  just  killed, 
remarked  :  '  Is  it  rude  to  look  at  a  dead  pigeon  ?  I  want 
to  see  where  its  blood  is."  I  am  disposed  to  think  that 
the  crushing  of  flies  and  moths  and  the  pulling  of  worms 
to  pieces  and  so  forth  are  prompted  by  this  curiosity.  The 
child  wants  to  see  where  the  blood  is,  what  the  bones  are 
like,  how  the  wings  are  fastened  in,  and  so  forth.  Perez 
tells  of  a  little  boy,  afterwards  an  artist,  who  used  to 
crush  flies  between  the  leaves  of  a  book  for  the  sake  of  the 
odd  designs  resulting.1  By  such  various  lines  of  concen- 
trated activity  does  the  child-mind  overlook  the  suffering 
which  it  causes. 

A  like  combination  of  love  of  power  and  of  curiosity 
seems  to  underlie  other  directions  of  childish  destructive- 
ness,  as  the  breaking  of  toys  and  the  pulling  of  flowers  to 
pieces.  In  certain  cases,  as  in  C.'s  annihilation  of  a  garden 
of  peonies,  the  love  of  power  or  effect  may  overtop  and 
outlive  the  curiosity,  becoming  a  sort  of  iconoclastic  fury.2 

I  think,  then,  that  we  may  give  the  little  child  the  benefit 
of  the  doubt,  and  not  assign  his  rough  handling  of  sentient 
things  to  a  wish  to  inflict  pain,  or  even  to  an  indifference 

1  L'Art  et  la  Poesie  chez  V Enfant,  p.  60. 

-  Ruskin  tells  us  that  when  a  child  he  pulled  flowers  to  pieces  '  in 
no  morbid  curiosity,  but  in  admiring  wonder'  (Prtzterita,  88).  Goethe 
gives  an  amusing  account  of  his  wholesale  throwing  of  crockery  out 
of  the  window  inspired  by  the  delight  of  watching  the  droll  way  in 
which  it  was  smashed  on  the  pavement. 

16 


242  .  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

to  pain  of  which  he  is  clearly  aware.  Wanton  activity,  the 
curiosity  of  the  experimenter,  and  delight  in  showing  one's 
power  and  producing  an  effect,  seem  sufficient  to  explain 
most  of  the  alleged  brutality  of  the  first  years. 

Probably  the  same  considerations  apply  to  those  milder 
forms  of  annoyance  which  children  are  apt  to  practise  on 
other  people  and  animals  alike.  That  a  child  early  develops 
a  decided  taste  for  'teasing'  is,  I  think,  certain.  But 
whether  carried  out  by  word  or  by  action  this  early  teasing 
seems  to  be  in  the  main  the  outcome  of  the  love  of  power, 
the  impulse  to  impose  one's  will  on  other  creatures.  We 
must  remember  that  these  wee  beings  feel  themselves  so 
subject  to  others'  power  that  they  are  very  naturally  driven 
to  use  all  opportunities  of  shaking  off  the  shackles,  and 
exercising  for  themselves  a  little  domination.  Cruelty,  that 
is  the  impulse  to  inflict  pain,  where  it  appears,  grows  up 
later,  and  though  it  has  its  roots  in  this  love  of  power  ought 
to  be  distinguished  from  it. 

We  have  now  looked  at  one  of  the  dark  sides  of  the 
child  and  have  found  that  though  it  is  unpleasant  it  is  not 
so  hideous  as  it  has  been  painted.  Children  are  no  doubt 
apt  to  be  passionate,  ferocious  in  their  anger,  and  sadly 
wanting  in  consideration  for  others ;  yet  it  is  consolatory 
to  reflect  that  their  savageness  is  not  quite  that  of  brutes, 
and  that  their  selfishness  and  cruelty  are  a  long  way  re- 
moved from  a  deliberate  and  calculating  egoism. 

Germs  of  Altruism. 

It  now  remains  to  point  out  that  there  is  another  and 
counterbalancing  side.  If  a  child  has  his  outbursts  of 
temper  he  has  also  his  fits  of  tenderness.  If  he  is  now  dead 
to  others'  sufferings  he  is  at  another  time  taken  with  a  most 
amiable  childish  concern  for  their  happiness.  In  order  to 
be  just  to  him  we  must  recognise  both  sides. 

It  must  not  be  forgotten  here  that  children  are  instinc- 
tively attachable  and  sociable  in  so  far  as  they  show  in  the 


RAW    MATERIAL   OF   MORALITY.  243 

first  weeks  that  they  get  used  to  and  dependent  on  the 
human  presence  and  are  miserable  when  this  is  taken  from 
them.  The  stopping  of  an  infant's  crying  at  night  on  hear- 
ing the  familiar  voice  of  its  mother  or  nurse  shows  this. 

In  this  instinct  of  companionship  there  is  involved  a 
vague  inarticulate  sympathy.  Just  as  the  attached  dog 
may  be  said  to  have  in  a  dim  fashion  a  feeling  of  oneness 
with  its  master,  so  the  child.  The  intenser  realisation  of 
this  oneness  comes  in  the  case  of  the  dog  and  of  the  child 
alike  after  separation.  The  wild  caressing  leaps  of  the 
quadruped  are  matched  by  the  warm  embracings  of  the 
little  biped.  Only  that  here,  too,  we  see  in  the  child  traces 
of  a  deeper  human  consciousness.  A  girl  of  thirteen 
months  was  separated  from  her  mother  during  six  weeks. 
On  the  mother's  return  she  was  speechless,  and  for  some 
time  could  not  bear  to  leave  her  restored  companion  for  a 
minute.  The  little  girl  M.  when  nearly  seventeen  months  old 
received  her  father  after  only  five  days'  absence  with  special 
marks  of  tenderness,  rushing  up  to  him,  smoothing  and 
stroking  his  face  and  giving  him  all  the  toys  in  the  room. 

This  sense  of  joining  on  one's  existence  to  another's 
is  not  sympathy  in  its  highest  form,  that  is,  a  conscious 
realisation  of  another's  feelings,  but  it  is  a  kind  of  sympathy 
after  all,  and  may  grow  into  something  better.  This  we 
may  see  in  the  return  of  the  childish  heart  to  its  resting- 
place  after  the  estrangement  introduced  by  '  naughtiness  '. 
The  relenting  after  passion,  the  reconciliation  after  punish- 
ment, are  these  not  the  experiences  which  help  to  raise  the 
dumb  animal  sympathy  of  the  first  months  into  a  true 
human  sense  of  fellowship  ?  But  this  part  of  the  develop- 
ment of  sympathy  belongs  to  another  chapter. 

Sympathy,  it  has  been  said,  is  a  kind  of  imitation,  and 
this  is  strikingly  illustrated  in  its  early  forms.  A  dog  will 
howl  piteously  in  response  to  another  dog's  howl :  similarly 
a  child  of  nine  and  a  half  months  has  been  known  to  cry 
violently  when  his  mother  or  father  pretended  to  cry. 


244  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

One  curious  manifestation  of  this  early  imitative  sym- 
pathy is  the  impulse  to  do  what  the  mother  does  and  to  be 
what  she  is.  Much  of  early  imitative  play  shows  this 
tendency.  It  is  more  than  a  cold  distant  copying  of 
another's  doings  :  it  is  full  of  the  warmth  of  attachment, 
and  it  is  entered  on  as  a  way  of  getting  nearer  to  the  object 
of  attachment.  Out  of  this,  too,  there  springs  the  germ  of 
a  higher  sympathy.  It  will  be  remembered  that  Laura 
Bridgman  bound  the  eyes  of  her  doll  with  a  bandage 
similar  to  the  one  she  herself  wore.  Through  this  sharing 
in  her  own  experience  the  doll  became  more  a  part  of 
herself.  Conversely,  a  child,  on  finding  that  her  mother's 
head  ached,  began  imitatively  to  make-believe  that  her  own 
head  was  hurt.  Sympathy  rests  on  community  of  experience, 
and  it  is  a  curious  fact  that  a  child,  before  he  can  fully 
sympathise  with  another's  trouble  and  make  it  his  own  by 
the  sympathetic  process  itself,  should  thus  try  by  a  kind  of 
childish  acting  to  realise  this  community  of  experience. 

From  this  imitative  acting  of  another's  trouble,  so  as  to 
share  in  it,  there  is  but  a  step  to  a  direct  sympathetic 
apprehension  of  it.  How  early  a  genuine  manifestation  of 
concern  about  another's  suffering  begins  to  show  itself  it  is 
almost  impossible  to  say.  Children  probably  differ  greatly 
in  this  respect.  I  have,  however,  one  case  which  is  so- 
curious  that  I  cannot  forbear  to  quote  it.  It  reaches  me,  I 
may  say,  by  a  thoroughly  trustworthy  channel. 

A  baby  aged  one  year  and  two  months  was  crawling 
on  the  floor.  An  elder  sister,  Katherine,  aged  six,  who 
was  working  at  a  wool  mat  could  not  get  on  very  well 
and  began  to  cry.  Baby  looked  up  and  grunted,  '  on  !  on ! ' 
and  kept  drawing  its  fingers  down  its  own  cheeks.  Here 
the  aunt  called  Miss  Katherine's  attention  to  baby,  a 
device  which  merely  caused  a  fresh  outburst  of  tears  ; 
whereupon  baby  proceeded  to  hitch  itself  along  to 
Katherine  with  many  repetitions  of  the  grunts  and  the 
mimetic  finger-movements.  Katherine,  fairly  overcome 


RAW    MATERIAL   OF   MORALITY.  245 

by  this,  took  baby  to  her  and  smiled ;  at  which  baby 
began  to  clap  its  hands  and  to  crow,  tracing  this  time 
the  course  of  the  tears  down  its  sister's  cheeks. 

This  pretty  nursery-picture  certainly  seems  to  illustrate 
a  rudiment  of  genuine  fellow-feeling.  Similarly  it  is  hard 
not  to  recognise  the  signs  of  a  sincere  concern  when  a  child 
of  two  runs  spontaneously  and  kisses  the  place  that  is  hurt, 
•even  though  it  is  not  to  be  doubted  that  the  graceful  action 
has  been  learnt  through  imitation. 

Very  sweet  and  sacred  to  the  mother  are  the  first  clear 
indications  of  the  chiWs  concern  for  herself.  These  are 
sporadic,  springing  up  rarely,  and  sometimes,  as  it  looks 
to  us,  capriciously.  Illness,  and  temporary  removal  are  a 
common  occasion  for  the  appearance  of  a  deeper  tender- 
ness in  the  young  heart.  A  little  boy  of  three  spon- 
taneously brought  his  story-book  to  his  mother  when  she 
lay  in  bed  ill  ;  and  the  same  child  used  to  follow  her  about 
after  her  recovery  with  all  the  devotion  of  a  little  knight. 

Valuable  and  entertaining,  too,  are  the  first  attempts  of 
the  child  at  consolation.  A  little  German  girl  aged  two 
and  a  half  who  had  just  lost  her  brother  seemed  very 
indifferent  for  some  days.  She  then  began  to  reflect  and  to 
ask  about  her  playmate.  On  seeing  her  mother's  distress 
she  proceeded  in  truly  childish  fashion  to  comfort  her; 
4  Never  mind,  mamma,  you  will  get  a  better  boy.  He 
was  a  ragamuffin'  ('Er  war  ein  Lump').  The  co-existence 
of  an  almost  barbarous  indifference  for  the  dead  brother 
with  practical  sympathy  for  the  living  mother  is  character- 
istic here.1 

A  deeper  and  more  thoughtful  sympathy  comes  with 
years  and  reflective  power.  Thought  about  the  overhanging 
terror,  death,  is  sometimes  the  awakener  of  this.  '  Are  you 
old,  mother  ?  '  asked  a  boy  of  five.  '  Why  ? '  she  answered. 
'  Because,'  he  continued,  '  the  older  you  are  the  nearer  you 

1  A  pretty  example  of  such  childish  consolation  is  given  by  P. 
Lombroso,  op.  cit.,  p.  94. 


246  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

are  to  dying.'  This  child  had  once  before  said  he  hoped 
his  mother  would  not  die  before  him,  and  this  suggests  that 
thought  of  his  own  forlorn  condition  was  in  his  mind  here : 
yet  we  may  hope  that  there  was  something  of  disinterested 
concern  too.1 

This  early  consideration  frequently  takes  the  practical 
form  of  helpfulness.  A  child  loves  nothing  better  than  to 
assist  you  in  little  household  occupations  ;  and  though  love 
of  activity  and  the  pleasure  of  imitating  no  doubt  count  for 
much  in  these  cases,  we  can,  I  think,  safely  set  down  some- 
thing to  the  wish  to  be  of  use.  This  inference  seems 
justified  by  the  fact  that  such  practical  helpfulness  is  not 
always  imitative.  A  little  boy  of  two  years  and  one  month 
happened  to  overhear  his  nurse  say  to  herself :  '  I  wish  that 
Anne  would  remember  to  fill  the  nursery  boiler'.  "He 
listened,  and  presently  trotted  off;  found  the  said  Anne 
doing  a  distant  grate,  pulled  her  by  the  apron,  saying: 
'  Nanna,  Nanna ! '  (come  to  nurse).  She  followed,  sur- 
prised and  puzzled,  the  child  pulling  all  the  way,  till,  having 
got  her  into  the  nursery,  he  pointed  to  the  boiler,  and 
added  :  '  Go  dare,  go  dare,'  so  that  the  girl  comprehended 
and  did  as  he  bade  her." 

With  this  practical  '  utilitarian  '  sympathy  there  goes 
a  quite  charming  wish  to  give  pleasure  in  other  ways.  A 
little  girl  when  just  a  year  old  was  given  to  offering  her 
toys,  flowers,  and  other  pretty  things  to  everybody.  Gene- 
rosity is  as  truly  an  impulse  of  childhood  as  greediness,  and 
it  is  odd  to  observe  their  alternate  play.  At  an  early  age, 
too,  a  child  tries  to  make  himself  agreeable  by  pretty  and 
dainty  courtesies.  A  little  girl,  aged  three  and  a  quarter, 
petitioned  her  mother  this  wise  :  '  Please,  mamma,  will  you 
pin  this  with  the  greatest  pleasure?"  Regard  for  another's 
feelings  was  surely  never  more  charmingly  expressed  than 
in  the  prayer  that  in  rendering  this  little  service  the  helper 
should  not  only  be  willing,  but  glad. 

1  Cf.  P.  Lombroso.  op.  cit.,  p.  87. 


RAW   MATERIAL   OF   MORALITY.  247 

Just  as  there  are  these  sporadic  growths  of  affectionate 
concern  and  wish  to  please  in  relation  to  the  mother  and 
others,  so  there  is  ample  evidence  of  kindness  to  animals. 
The  charge  of  cruelty  in  the  case  of  little  children  is,  indeed, 
seen  to  be  a  gross  libel  as  soon  as  we  consider  their  whole 
behaviour  towards  the  animal  world. 

I  have  touched  above  on  the  vague  alarms  which  this 
animal  world  has  for  tiny  children.  It  is  only  fair  to 
them  to  say  that  these  alarms  are  for  the  most  part 
transitory,  giving  place  to  interest,  attachment  and  fellow- 
feeling.  In  a  sense  a  child  may  be  said  to  belong  to  the 
animal  community,  as  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling's  charming 
account  of  the  Jungle  prettily  suggests.  Has  he  not, 
indeed,  at  first  more  in  common  with  the  dog  and  cat,  the 
pet  rabbit  or  dormouse,  than  with  that  grown-up  human 
community  which  is  apt  to  be  so  preoccupied  with  things 
beyond  his  understanding,  and  in  many  cases,  at  least,  to 
wear  so  unfriendly  a  mien  ?  We  must  remember,  too,  that 
children  as  a  rule  know  nothing  of  the  prejudices,  of  the 
disgusts,  which  make  grown  people  put  animals  so  far 
from  them.  The  boy  C.  was  nonplussed  by  his  mother's 
horror  of  the  caterpillar.  A  child  has  been  known  quite 
spontaneously  to  call  a  worm  '  beautiful '. 

As  soon  as  the  first  fear  of  the  strangeness  is  mastered 
a  child  will  take  to  an  animal.  A  little  boy  of  fifteen 
months  quickly  overcame  his  fright  at  the  barking  of  his 
grandfather's  dog,  and  began  to  share  his  biscuits  with  him, 
to  give  him  flowers  to  smell,  and  to  throw  stones  for  his 
amusement.  This  mastery  of  fear  by  attachment  takes  a 
higher  form  when  later  on  the  child  will  stick  to  his  dumb 
companion  after  suffering  from  his  occasional  fits  of  temper. 
Ruskin  in  his  reminiscences  gives  a  striking  example  of  this 
triumph  of  attachment  over  fear.  When  five  years  old,  he 
tells  us,  he  was  taken  by  the  serving-man  to  see  a  favourite 
Newfoundland  dog  in  the  stable.  The  man  rather  foolishly 
humoured  the  child's  wish  to  kiss  Leo  (the  dog)  and  lowered 


248  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

him  so  that  his  face  came  near  the  animal's.  Hereupon  the 
dog,  who  was  dining,  resenting  the  interruption  of  his  meal, 
bit  out  a  piece  of  the  boy's  lip.  His  only  fear  after  this  was 
lest  the  dog  should  be  sent  away.1 

Children  will  further  at  a  quite  early  age  betray  the 
germ  of  a  truly  humane  feeling  towards  animals.  The  same 
little  boy  that  bravely  got  over  his  fear  of  the  dog's  barking 
would,  when  nineteen  months  old,  begin  to  cry  on  seeing  a 
horse  fall  in  the  street.  More  passionate  outbursts  of  pity 
are  seen  at  a  later  age.  A  boy  five  years  and  nine  months 
had  a  kitten  of  which  he  was  very  fond.  One  day,  after 
two  or  three  days'  absence  from  the  house,  it  came  back  with 
one  foot  much  mutilated  and  the  leg  swollen,  evidently  not 
far  from  dying.  "When  (writes  the  mother)  he  saw  it  he 
burst  into  uncontrollable  tears  and  was  more  affected  than 
I  have  ever  seen  him.  The  kitten  was  taken  away  and 
drowned,  and  ever  since  (a  month)  he  has  shown  great 
reluctance  in  speaking  of  it,  and  never  mentions  it  to  any 
one  but  those  who  saw  the  cat  at  the  time.  He  says  it  is 
too  sad  to  tell  any  one  of  it."  The  boy  C.  when  only  four 
was  moved  to  passionate  grief  at  the  sight  of  a  dead  dog 
taken  from  a  pond. 

The  indignation  of  children  at  the  doings  of  the  butcher, 
the  hunter  and  others,  shows  how  deeply  pitiful  considera- 
tion for  animals  is  rooted  in  their  hearts.  This  is  one  of 
the  most  striking  manifestations  of  the  better  side  of  child- 
nature  and  deserves  a  chapter  to  itself. 

It  is  sometimes  asked  why  children  should  take  animals 
to  their  bosoms  in  this  fashion  and  lavish  so  much  fellow- 
feeling  on  them.  It  seems  easy  to  understand  how  they 
come  to  choose  animals,  especially  young  ones,  as  play- 
mates, and  now  and  again  to  be  ruthlessly  inconsiderate  of 
their  comfort  in  their  boisterous  gambols  ;  but  why  should 
they  be  so  affected  by  their  sufferings  and  champion  their 
rights  so  sturdily  ?  I  think  the  answer  is  not  hard  to  find. 
1  Prceterita,  pp.  105-6. 


RAW    MATERIAL   OF   MORALITY.  249 

The  sympathy  and  love  which  the  child  gives  to  animals 
grow  out  of  a  sort  of  blind  gregarious  instinct,  and  this 
again  seems  to  be  rooted  in  a  similarity  of  position  and 
needs.  As  M.  Compayre  well  says  on  this  point:  "He  (the 
child)  sympathises  naturally  with  creatures  which  resemble 
him  on  so  many  sides,  in  which  he  finds  wants  analogous 
to  his  own,  the  same  appetite,  the  same  impulses  to  move- 
ment, the  same  desire  for  caresses.  To  resemble  is  already 
to  love."  l  I  think,  however,  that  a  deeper  feeling  comes  in 
from  the  first  and  gathers  strength  as  the  child  hears  about 
men's  treatment  of  animals,  I  mean  a  sense  of  a  common 
danger  and  helplessness  face  to  face  with  the  human  'giant'. 
The  more  passionate  attachment  of  the  child  to  the  animal 
is  the  outcome  of  the  wide-spread  instinct  of  helpless  things 
to  band  together.  A  mother  once  remarked  to  her  boy, 
between  five  and  six  years  old:  'Why,  R.,  I  believe  you  are 
kinder  to  the  animals  than  to  me '.  '  Perhaps  I  am,'  he 
replied,  'you  see  they  are  not  so  well  off  as  you  are.'  May 
there  not  be  something  of  this  sense  of  banding  and  mutual 
defence  on  the  animals'  side  too?  The  idea  does  not  look  so 
absurd  when  we  remember  how  responsive,  how  forbearing, 
how  ready  to  defend,  a  dog  will  often  show  itself  towards 
a  '  wee  mite '  of  a  child.  This  same  instinct  to  stand  up 
for  the  helpless  inferior  shows  itself  in  children's  attitude 
towards  servants  when  scolded  and  especially  when  dis- 
missed.2 

The  same  outpourings  of  affection  are  seen  in  the 
dealings  of  children  with  their  toy  babies  and  animals. 
Allowing  for  occasional  outbreaks  of  temper  and  acts  of 
violence,  the  child's  intercourse  with  his  doll  and  his  toy 
'  £ee  See '  is  a  wonderful  display  of  loving  solicitude  ;  a 
solicitude  which  is  at  once  tender  and  corrective,  and  has 
the  enduring  constancy  of  a  maternal  instinct.  No  one 
can  watch  the  care  given  to  a  doll,  the  wide-ranging  efforts 

1  Op.  cit.,  p.  108. 

a  Illustrations  are  given  by  Paola  Lombroso,  op.  cit.,  p.  96  f. 


250  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

to  provide  for  its  comfort,  to  make  it  look  pretty,  and 
to  get  it  to  behave  nicely,  and  note  the  misery  when  it 
is  missing,  without  acknowledging  that  in  this  plaything 
humanised  by  childish  fancy,  and  brought  by  daily  habit 
into  the  warmest  intimacy  of  daily  companionship,  we  have 
the  focal  meeting-point  of  the  tender  impulses  of  the  child. 

Lastly,  the  reader  may  be  reminded  that  childish  kind- 
ness and  pitifulness  extend  to  what  look  to  us  still  less 
deserving  objects  in  the  inanimate  world.  The  manifesta- 
tions of  pity  for  the  falling  leaves  and  for  the  stones  con- 
demned to  lie  always  in  one  place,  referred  to  above,  show 
how  quick  childish  feeling  is  to  detect  what  is  sad  in  the 
look  of  things.  Children  have  even  been  known  to  apply 
the  commiserating  vocable  '  poor '  to  a  torn  paper  figure, 
and  to  a  bent  pin.  It  seems  fair  to  suppose  that  here, 
too,  the  more  tender  heart  of  the  child  saw  occasion  for 
pity. 

It  is  worth  noting  that  childish  sorrow  at  the  sufferings 
of  things  is  sometimes  so  keen,  that  even  artistic  descrip- 
tions which  contain  a  '  cruel '  element  are  shunned.  A 
little  boy  under  four  "  is  indignant  (writes  his  mother)  at 
any  picture  where  an  animal  suffers.  He  has  even  turned 
against  several  of  his  favourite  pictures — German  Bilder- 
bogen,  because  they  are  '  cruel/  as  the  bear  led  home  with 
a  corkscrew  in  his  nose."  The  extreme  manifestation  of 
this  shrinking  from  the  representation  of  animal  or  human 
suffering  is  dislike  for  '  sad  stories  '.  The  unsophisticated 
tender  heart  of  the  child  can  find  no  pleasure  in  horrors 
which  appear  to  be  the  supreme  delight  of  many  an  adult 
reader. 

Here,  however,  it  is  evident,  we  verge  on  the  confines 
of  sentimental  pity.  It  is  to  be  remarked  that  highly 
imaginative  children  shed  most  tears  over  these  fictitious 
sufferings.  Children  with  more  matter-of-fact  minds  and 
a  practical  turn  are  not  so  affected.  Thus  a  mother  writes 
of  her  two  girls  :  '  M.  being  the  most  imaginative  is  and 


RAW   MATERIAL   OF   MORALITY.  25 1 

always  has  been  much  affected  by  sad  stories,  especially 
if  read  to  her  with  dramatic  inflexions  of  voice.  From  two 
years  old  upwards  these  have  always  affected  her  to  tears, 
whilst  P.  who  is  really  the  most  tender-hearted  and  helpful, 
but  has  little  imagination,  never  cries  at  sad  stories,  and 
when  four  years  old  explained  to  me  that  she  did  not 
mind  them  because  she  knew  they  didn't  really  happen.' 

It  appears  to  me  to  be  incontestable  that  in  this  spon- 
taneous outgoing  of  fellow-feeling  towards  other  creatures, 
human  and  animal,  the  child  manifests  something  of  a 
truly  moral  quality.  C.'s  stout  and  persistent  champion- 
ship of  the  London  horses  against  the  oppression  of  the 
bearing- rein  had  in  it  something  of  righteous  indignation. 
The  way  in  which  his  mind  was  at  this  period  pre-occupied 
with  animal  suffering  suggests  that  his  sympathies  with 
animals  were  rousing  the  first  fierce  protest  against  the 
wicked  injustice  of  the  world.  The  boy  De  Quincey  got 
this  first  sense  of  the  existence  of  moral  evil  in  another 
way  through  his  sympathy  with  a  sister  who,  rumour  said, 
had  been  brutally  treated  by  a  servant.  He  could  not,  he 
tells  us,  bear  to  look  on  the  woman.  It  was  not  anger. 
"  The  feeling  which  fell  upon  me  was  a  shuddering  horror 
as  upon  a  first  glimpse  of  the  truth  that  I  was  in  a  world 
of  evil  and  strife."  l 

Children  s  Lies. 

We  may  now  turn  to  the  other  main  charge  against 
children,  that  of  lying.  According  to  many,  children  are 
in  general  accomplished  little  liars,  to  the  manner  born, 
and  equally  adept  with  the  mendacious  savage.  Even 
writers  on  childhood,  by  no  means  prejudiced  against  them, 
lean  to  the  view  that  untruth  is  universal  among  children, 
and  to  some  extent  at  least  innate.2 

1  Autobiographical  Sketches,  chap.  i. 

-  See  the  quotations  from  Montaigne  and  Perez,  given  by  Com- 
payre,  op.  cit.,  p.  309  f. 


252  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

Here,  surely,  there  is  need  of  discrimination.  A  lie 
connotes,  or  should  connote,  an  assertion  made  with  full 
consciousness  of  its  untruth,  and  in  order  to  mislead.  It 
may  well  be  doubted  whether  little  children  have  so  clear 
an  apprehension  of  what  we  understand  by  truth  and 
falsity  as  to  be  liars  in  this  full  sense.  Much  of  what 
seems  shocking  to  the  adult  unable  to  place  himself  at 
the  level  of  childish  intelligence  and  feeling  will  probably 
prove  to  be  something  far  less  serious.  It  is  satisfactory 
to  note  a  tendency  to  take  a  milder  and  more  reasonable 
view  of  this  infantile  fibbing ;  and  in  what  follows  I  can 
but  follow  up  the  excellent  recent  studies  of  Dr.  Stanley 
Hall,  and  M.  Compayre.1 

It  is  desirable  to  inspect  a  little  more  closely  the 
various  forms  of  this  early  mendacity.  To  begin  with 
those  little  ruses  and  dissimulations  which,  according  to 
M.  Perez,  are  apt  to  appear  almost  from  the  cradle  in  the 
case  of  certain  children,  it  is  plainly  difficult  to  bring  them 
into  the  category  of  full-fledged  lies.  When,  for  example, 
a  child  wishing  to  keep  a  thing  hides  it,  and  on  your 
asking  for  it  holds  out  empty  hands,  it  would  be  hard  to 
name  this  action  a  lie,  even  though  there  is  in  it  a  germ 
of  deception.  We  must  remember  that  children  have  an 
early  developed  instinct  to  secrete  things,  and  the  little 
dissimulation  in  these  actions  may  be  a  mere  outcome 
of  this  hiding  propensity,  and  the  accompanying  wish  that 
you  should  not  get  the  hidden  thing.  Refusals  to  tell 
secrets,  or  as  C.  called  them  '  private  secrets '  (a  fine  dis- 
tinction), show  the  same  thing.  A  child  when  badgered 
is  most  jealous  in  guarding  what  he  has  been  told,  or  what 
his  fancy  has  made  a  secret.  The  little  ruses  or  '  acted  lies' 
to  which  I  am  now  referring  seem  to  me  at  the  worst 
attempts  to  put  you  off  the  scent  in  what  is  regarded  as  a 
private  matter,  and  to  have  the  minimum  of  intentional 

1  Stanley  Hall,  "Children's  Lies,"  Amcr.  Journal  of  Psychology, 
1890  :  Compayre,  op.  cit.,  p.  309  ff. 


RAW    MATERIAL   OF   MORALITY.  253 

deception.  As  Mrs.  Fry  has  well  shown,  this  childish 
passion  for  keeping  things  secret  may  account  for  later 
and  more  serious-looking  falsehoods.1 

More  distinct  marks  of  mendacity  appear  when  the 
child  comes  to  use  language  and  proffers  statements  which 
if  he  reflected  he  might  know  to  be  false.  It  may  readily  be 
thought  that  no  child  who  has  the  intelligence  to  make 
statements  at  all  could  make  false  ones  without  some  little 
consciousness  of  the  falsity.  But  here  I  suspect  we  judge 
harshly,  applying  adult  tests  to  cases  where  they  are  inap- 
propriate. Anybody  who  has  observed  children's  play  and 
dramatic  talk,  and  knows  how  readily  and  completely  they 
can  imagine  the  non-existent  so  as  to  lose  sight  of  the 
existent,  will  be  chary  when  talking  of  them  of  using  the 
word  lie.  There  may  be  solemn  sticklers  for  truth  who 
would  be  shocked  to  hear  the  child  when  at  play  saying, 
'  I  am  a  coachman,'  '  Dolly  is  crying,'  and  so  forth.  But 
the  discerning  see  nothing  to  be  alarmed  at  here.  Similarly 
when  a  little  girl  of  two  and  a  half  after  running  on 
with  a  pretty  long  rigmarole  of  sounds  devoid  of  all  mean- 
ing said  :  "  It's  because  you  don't  understand  me,  papa  ". 
Here  the  love  of  mystery  and  secrecy  aided  by  the  drama- 
tic impulse  made  the  nonsense  talk  real  talk.  The  wee 
thing  doubtless  had  a  feeling  of  superiority  in  talking  in  a 
language  which  was  unintelligible  to  her  all-wise  papa. 

On  much  the  same  level  of  moral  obliquity  are  those 
cases  where  a  child  will  say  the  opposite  of  what  he  is  told, 
turning  authoritative  utterances  upside  down.  A  quaint 
instance  is  quoted  by  Compayre  from  Guyau.  Guyau's 
little  boy  (age  not  given)  was  overheard  saying  to  himself: 
"  Papa  parle  mal,  il  a  dit  sevette,  bebe  parle  bien,  il  dit 
serviette" .  Such  reversals  are  a  kind  of  play  too  :  the  child 
not  unnaturally  gets  tired  now  and  then  of  being  told  that 
he  is  wrong,  and  for  the  moment  imagines  himself  right 
and  his  elders  wrong,  immensely  enjoying  the  idea. 

1  Uninitiated  ('  A  Discovery  in  Morals  '). 


254  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

A  graver-looking  case  presents  itself  when  an  '  untruth  ' 
is  uttered  in  answer  to  a  question.  C.  on  being  asked  by 
his  mother  who  told  him  something,  answered,  '  Dolly '. 
'  False,  and  knowingly  false,'  somebody  will  say,  especially 
when  he  learns  that  the  depraved  youngster  instantly  pro- 
ceeded to  laugh.  But  let  us  look  a  little  closer.  The 
question  had  raised  in  C.'s  small  mind  the  idea  that  some- 
body had  told  him.  This  is  a  process  of  '  suggestion ' 
which,  as  we  shall  see  presently,  sways  a  child's  mind  as  it 
sways  that  of  the  hypnotised  adult.  And  there  close  by 
the  child  was  dolly,  and  the  child's  make-believe  includes, 
as  we  all  know,  much  important  communication  with  dolly. 
What  more  natural  than  that  the  idea  should  at  once  seize 
his  imagination  ?  But  the  laugh  ?  Well  I  am  ready  to 
admit  that  there  was  a  touch  of  playful  defiance  here,  of 
young  impishness.  The  expression  on  the  mother's  face 
showed  him  that  his  bold  absurd  fancy  had  produced  its 
half-startling,  half-amusing  effect ;  and  there  is  nothing 
your  little  actor  likes  more  than  this  after-effect  of  startling 
you.  But  more,  it  gave  him  at  the  same  instant  a  glimpse 
of  the  outside  look  of  his  fancy,  of  the  unreality  of  the 
untruth  ;  and  the  laugh  probably  had  in  it  the  delight  of 
the  little  rebel,  of  the  naughty  rogue  who  loves  now  and 
then  to  set  law  at  defiance. 

A  quick  vivid  fancy,  a  childish  passion  for  acting  a  part, 
these  backed  by  a  strong  impulse  to  astonish,  and  a 
turn  for  playful  rebellion,  seem  to  me  to  account  for  this 
and  other  similar  varieties  of  early  misstatement.  Naughty 
they  no  doubt  are  in  a  measure ;  but  is  it  not  just  that  play- 
ing at  being  naughty  which  has  in  it  nothing  really  bad, 
and  is  removed  toto  coelo  from  downright  honest  lying?  I 
speak  the  more  confidently  as  to  C.'s  case  as  I  happen  to 
know  that  he  was  in  his  serious  moods  particularly,  one 
might  almost  say  pedantically,  truthful. 

A  somewhat  different  case  is  that  where  the  vivid  fancy 
underlying  the  misstatement  may  be  supposed  to  lead  to  a 


RAW    MATERIAL   OF    MORALITY.  255 

measure  of  self-deception.  When,  for  example,  a  child 
wants  to  be  carried  and  says,  "  My  leg  hurts  me  and  my 
foot  too  just  here,  I  can't  walk,  I  can't,  I  can't," l  it  is 
possible  at  least  that  he  soon  realises  the  tiredness  he 
begins  by  half  feigning.  The  Worcester  collection  gives  an 
example.  "  I  was  giving  some  cough  syrup,  and  E.  (aged 
three  years  two  months)  ran  to  me  saying  :  '  I  am  sick  too, 
and  I  want  some  medicine '.  She  then  tried  to  cough. 
Every  time  she  would  see  me  taking  the  syrup  bottle 
afterwards,  she  would  begin  to  cough.  The  syrup  was  very 
sweet."  This  looks  simply  awful.  But  what  if  the  child 
were  of  so  imaginative  a  turn  that  the  sight  of  the  syrup 
given  to  the  sick  child  produced  a  more  or  less  complete 
illusion  of  being  herself  sick,  an  illusion  strong  enough  to 
cause  the  irritation  and  the  cough  ?  The  idea  may  seem 
far-fetched,  but  deserves  to  be  considered  before  we  brand 
the  child  with  the  name  liar. 

The  vivid  fanciful  realisation  which  in  this  instance  was 
sustained  by  the  love  of  sweet  things  is  in  many  cases 
inspired  by  other  and  later  developed  feelings.  How  much 
false  statement — and  that  not  only  among  little  children — 
is  of  the  nature  of  exaggeration  and  directed  to  producing 
a  strong  effect.  When,  for  example,  the  little  four-year-old 
draws  himself  up  and  shouts  exultantly,  "See,  mamma,  how 
tall  I  am,  I  am  growing  so  fast,  I  shall  soon  be  a  giant,"  or 
boasts  of  his  strength  and  tells  you  the  impossible  things  he 
is  going  to  do,  the  element  of  braggadocio  is  on  the  surface, 
and  imposes  on  nobody. 

No  doubt  these  propensities,  though  not  amounting  in 
the  stage  of  development  now  dealt  with  to  full  lying,  may 
if  unrestrained  develop  into  this.  An  unbridled  fancy 
and  strong  love  of  effect  will  lead  an  older  child  to  say 
what  he  knows,  vaguely  at  least,  at  the  moment  to  be 
false  in  order  to  startle  and  mystify  others.  Such  exagge- 
ration of  the  impulses  is  distinctly  abnormal,  as  may  be 
1  See  P.  Lombroso,  op.  cit.,  p.  74. 


256  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

seen  by  its  affinity  to  what  we  can  observe  in  the  case  of 
the  insane.  The  same  is  true  of  the  exaggeration  of  the 
vain-glorious  or  'showing  off'  impulses,  as  illustrated  for 
example  in  the  cases  mentioned  by  Dr.  Stanley  Hall  of 
children  who  on  going  to  a  new  town  or  school  would 
assume  new  characters  which  were  kept  up  with  difficult)* 
by  means  of  many  false  pretences.1 

A  fertile  source  of  childish  untruth,  especially  in  the 
case  of  girls,  is  the  wish  to  please.  Here  we  have  to  do 
with  very  dissimilar  things.  An  emotional  child  who  in  a 
sudden  fit  of  tenderness  for  mother,  aunt  or  teacher  gushes 
out,  '  Oh  I  do  love  you,'  or  '  What  sweet  lovely  eyes  you 
have,'  or  other  pretty  flattery,  may  be  sincere  for  the.  moment, 
the  exaggeration  being  indeed  the  outcome  of  a  sudden 
ebullition  of  emotion.  There  is  more  of  acting  and  artful- 
ness in  the  flatteries  which  take  their  rise  in  a  calculating 
wish  to  say  the  nice  agreeable  thing.  Some  children  are, 
I  believe,  adepts  at  these  amenities.  Those  in  whom  the 
impulse  is  strong  and  dominant  are  presumably  those  who 
in  later  years  make  the  good  society  actors.  In  all  this 
childish  simulation  and  exaggeration  we  have  to  do  with 
the  germs  of  what  may  become  a  great  moral  evil,  insincerity, 
that  is  falsity  in  respect  of  what  is  best  and  ought  to  be 
sacred.  Yet  this  childish  flattery,  though  undoubtedly  a 
mild  mendacity,  is  a  most  amiable  mendacity  through  its 
charming  motive — always  supposing  that  it  is  a  pure  wish 
to  please,  and  is  not  complicated  with  an  arriere  pensee,  the 
hope  of  gaining  some  favour  from  the  object  of  the  devotion. 
Perhaps  there  is  no  variety  of  childish  fault  more  difficult 
to  deal  with  ;  if  only  for  the  reason  that  in  checking  the 
impulse  we  are  robbing  ourselves  of  the  sweetest  offerings 
of  childhood. 

The   other    side   of  this   wish    to  please   is    the    fear 
to  give  offence,  and  this,   I  suspect,  is  a  fertile  source  of 
childish  prevarication.     If,  for  example,  a  child  is  asked 
1  Article  "  Children's  Lies,"  p.  67. 


RAW   MATERIAL   OF    MORALITY. 

whether  he  doe's  not  like  or  admire  something,  his  feeling 
that  the  questioner  expects  him  to  say  '  Yes  '  makes  it  very 
hard  to  say  '  No '.  Mrs.  Burnett  gives  us  a  reminiscence  of 
this  early  experience.  When  she  was  less  than  three,  she 
writes,  a  lady  visitor,  a  friend  of  her  mother,  having  found 
out  that  the  baby  newly  added  to  the  family  was  called 
Edith,  remarked  to  her  :  '  That's  a  pretty  name.  My  baby 
is  Eleanor.  Isn't  that  a  pretty  name  ?  '  On  being  thus 
questioned  she  felt  in  a  dreadful  difficulty,  for  she  did  not 
like  the  sound  of  'Eleanor,'  and  yet  feared  to  be  rude  and 
say  so.  She  got  out  of  it  by  saying  she  did  not  like  the 
name  as  well  as  '  Edith '. 

These  temptations  and  struggles,  which  may  impress 
themselves  on  memory  for  the  whole  of  life,  illustrate  the 
influence  of  older  persons'  wishes  and  expectations  on  the 
childish  mind.  It  is  possible  that  we  have  here  to  do  with 
something  akin  to  "  suggestion,"  that  force  which  produces 
such  amazing  results  on  the  hypnotised  subject,  and  is 
known  to  be  a  potent  influence  for  good  or  for  evil  on  the 
young  mind.  A  leading  question  of  the  form,  '  Isn't  this 
pretty?  '  '  Aren't  you  fond  of  me  ?  '  may  easily  overpower 
for  a  moment  the  child's  own  conviction  super-imposing 
that  of  the  stronger  mind.  Such  passive  utterance  coming 
from  a  mind  over-ridden  by  another's  authority  is  not  to  be 
confounded  with  conscious  falsehood. 

This  suggestion  often  combines  with  other  forces. 
Here  is  a  good  example.  A  little  American  girl,  sent  into 
the  oak  shrubbery  to  get  a  leaf,  saw  a  snake,  which  so 
frightened  her  that  she  ran  home  without  the  leaf.  As 
cruel  fate  would  have  it  she  met  her  brothers  and  told 
them  she  had  seen  a  '  'sauger '.  "  They  knew  (writes  the 
lady  who  recalls  this  reminiscence  of  her  childhood)  the 
difference  between  snakes  and  their  habits,  and,  boy-like, 
wanted  to  tease  me,  and  said  '  'Twas  no  'sauger — it  didn't 
have  a  red  ring  round  its  neck,  now,  did  it  ? '  My  heated 
imagination  saw  just  such  a  serpent  as  soon  as  their  words 

17 


258  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

were  spoken,  and  I  declared  it  had  a  ring  about  '  its  neck  '." 
In  this  way  she  was  led  on  to  say  that  it  had  scars  and 
a  little  bell  on  its'  neck,  and  was  soundly  rated  by  her 
brothers  as  a  '  liar  \l  Here  we  have  a  case  of  "  illusion  of 
memory  "  induced  by  suggestion  acting  on  a  mind  made 
preternaturally  sensitive  by  the  fear  from  which  it  had  not 
yet  recovered.  If  there  was  a  germ  of  mendacity  in  the 
case  it  had  its  source  in  the  shrinking  from  the  brothers' 
ridicule,  the  wish  not  to  seem  utterly  ignorant  about  these 
boyish  matters,  the  snakes.  Yet  who  would  say  that  such 
swift  unseizable  movements  of  feeling  in  the  dim  back- 
ground of  consciousness  made  the  child's  responses  lies  in 
the  proper  sense  of  the  word  ? 

It  seems  paradoxical,  yet  is,  I  believe,  indisputable, 
that  a  large  part  of  childish  untruth  comes  upon  the  scene 
in  connexion  with  moral  authority  and  discipline.  We 
shall  see  by-and-by  that  unregenerate  child-nature  is  very 
apt  to  take  up  the  attitude  of  self-defence  towards  those 
who  administer  law  and  inflict  punishment.  Very  little 
children  brought  face  to  face  with  restraint  and  punish- 
ment will  '  try  on '  these  ruses.  Here  are  one  or  two 
illustrations  from  the  notes  on  the  little  girl  M.  When 
seventeen  and  a  half  months  old  she  threw  down  her  gloves 
when  wheeled  in  her  mail-cart  by  her  mother.  The  latter 
picked  them  up  and  told  her  not  to  throw  them  away  again. 
She  was  at  first  good,  then  seemed  to  deliberate  and  finally 
called  out :  '  Mamma,  Bubbo  '  (dog).  The  mother  turned 
to  look,  and  the  little  imp  threw  her  gloves  away  again, 
laughing ;  there  was  of  course  no  dog.  The  fib  about 
the  dog  formed  part  of  a  piece  of  childish  make-believe,  of 
an  infantile  comedy.  It  was  hardly  more  when  about  two 
months  later,  after  she  had  thrown  down  ar  d  broken  her 
tea-things,  and  her  mother  had  come  up  to  her,  she  said : 
'  Mamma  broke  tea-things — beat  mamma,'  and  proceeded 
to  beat  her.  In  connexion  with  such  little  child-comedies 

1  Sara  E.  Wiltshire,  The  Christian  Union,  vol.  xl.,  No.  26. 


RAW    MATERIAL   OF    MORALITY.  259 

there  can  be  no  talk  of  deception.  They  are  the  outcome 
of  the  childish  instinct  to  upset  the  serious  attitude  of 
authority  by  a  bit  of  fun. 

The  little  stratagem  begins  to  look  more  serious  when 
the  child  gets  artful  enough  to  put  the  mother  off  the  scent 
by  a  false  statement.  For  example,  a  mite  of  three  having 
in  a  moment  of  temper  called  her  mother  '  monkey,'  and 
being  questioned  as  to  what  she  had  said,  replied  :  "  I  said 
I  was  a  monkey  ".  In  some  cases  the  child  does  not  wait 
to  be  questioned.  A  little  girl  mentioned  by  Compayre, 
being  put  out  by  something  the  mother  had  done  or  said, 
cried :  '  Nasty  ! '  (Vilaine  !)  then  after  a  significant  silence, 
corrected  herself  in  this  wise,  '  Dolly  nasty '  (Poupee 
vilaine).  The  skill  with  which  this  transference  was 
effected  without  'any  violence  to  grammar  argues  a  pre- 
cocious art.1 

Our  moral  discipline  may  develop  untruth  in  another 
way.  When  the  punishment  has  been  inflicted  and  the 
governor,  relenting  from  the  brutal  harshness,  asks :  '  Are 
you  sorry  ?  '  or  '  Aren't  you  sorry  ?  '  the  answer  is  exceed- 
ingly likely  to  be  '  No,'  even  though  this  is  in  a  sense  untrue. 
More  clearly  is  this  lying  of  obstinacy  seen  where  a  child 
is  shut  up  and  kept  without  food.  Asked  :  '  Are  you 
hungry  ? '  the  hardy  little  sinner  stifles  his  sensations  and 
pluckily  answers  '  No,'  even  though  the  low  and  dismal 
character  of  the  sound  shows  that  the  untruth  is  but  a  half- 
hearted affair. 

I  have  tried  to  show  how  a  child's  untruths  may  be 
more  than  half  "playing,"  how  when  they  are  serious 
assertions  they  may  involve  a  measure  of  self-deception, 
and  how  even  when  consciously  false  they  may  have 
their  origin  in  excusable  circumstances  and  feelings.  In 
urging  all  this  I  do  not  wish  to  deny  the  statement  that 
children  will  sometimes  deliberately  invent  a  lie  from  a 

1  Perez  gives  a  similar  story,  only  that  the  epithet  '  vilaine  '  was 
here  transferred  to  '  1'eau '.  U Education  dh  If  berceau,  p.  53. 


26O  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

base  motive,  as  when  a  girl  of  three  seeing  her  little  brother 
caressed  by  her  mother  for  some  minutes  and  feeling  herself 
neglected  fabricated  the  story  that  '  Henri '  had  been  cruel 
to  the  parrot.1  Yet  I  am  disposed  to  look  on  such  mean 
falsehoods  as  exceptional  if  not  abnormal. 

There  is  much  even  yet  to  be  done  in  clearing  up  the 
modus  operandi  of  children's  lies.  How  quick,  for  example,, 
is  a  child  to  find  out  the  simple  good-natured  people,  as 
the  servant-maid,  or  gardener,  who  will  listen  to  his 
romancing  and  flatter  him  by  appearing  to  accept  it  all  as 
gospel.  More  significant  is  the  fact  that  intentional  decep- 
tion is  apt  to  show  itself  towards  certain  people  only- 
There  is  many  a  school-boy  who  would  think  it  no  dis- 
honour to  say  what  is  untrue  to  those  he  dislikes,  especi- 
ally by  way  of  getting  them  into  hot  water,  though  he  would 
feel  it  mean  and  base  to  lie  to  his  mother  or  his  father,  and 
bad  form  to  lie  to  the  head-master.  Similar  distinctions 
show  themselves  in  earlier  stages,  and  are  another  point  of 
similarity  between  the  child  and  the  savage  whose  ideas  of 
truthfulness  seem  to  be  truthfulness  for  my  people  only. 
This  is  a  side  of  the  subject  which  would  repay  fuller 
inquiry. 

Another  aspect  of  the  subject  which  has  been  but  little 
investigated  is  the  influence  of  habit  in  the  domain  of  lying, 
and  the  formation  of  persistent  permanent  lies.  The  im- 
pulse to  stick  to  an  untruth  when  once  uttered  is  very 
human,  and  in  the  case  of  the  child  is  enforced  by  the  fear 
of  discovery.  This  applies  not  only  to  falsehoods  foisted 
on  persons  in  authority,  but  to  those  by  which  clever  boys 
and  girls  take  pleasure  in  befooling  the  inferior  wits  of 
others.  In  this  way  there  grow  up  in  the  nursery  and  in 
the  playground  traditional  myths  and  legends  which  are 
solemnly  believed  by  the  simple-minded.  Such  invention 
is  in  part  the  outcome  of  the  "  pleasures  of  the  imagination". 
Yet  it  is  probable  that  these  are  in  all  cases  reinforced  not 
1  Perez,  L1  Education  dh  le  berceaii,  p.  54. 


RAW  MATERIAL  OF  MORALITY.         26 1 

only  by  the  wish  to  produce  an  effect,  but  by  the  love  of 
power  which  in  the  child  not  endowed  with  physical  prowess 
is  apt  to  show  itself  in  hood-winking  and  practical  joking. 

Closely  connected  with  the  permanence  of  untruths  is 
the  contagiousness  of  lying.  The  propagation  of  falsehood 
is  apt  to  be  promoted  by  a  certain  tremulous  admiration  for 
the  hardihood  of  the  lie  and  by  the  impulses  of  the  rebel 
which  never  quite  slumber  even  in  the  case  of  fairly  obe- 
dient children.  I  suspect,  however,  that  it  is  in  all  cases 
largely  due  to  the  force  of  suggestion.  The  falsehood 
boldly  announced  is  apt  to  captivate  the  mind  and  hold  it 
under  a  kind  of  spell. 

This  effect  of  suggestion  in  generating  falsehood  is  very 
marked  in  those  pathological  or  semi-pathological  cases 
where  children  have  been  led  to  give  false  testimony.  It 
is  now  known  that  it  is  quite  possible  to  provoke  an  illusion 
of  memory  in  certain  children  between  the  ages  of  six  and 
fifteen  by  simply  affirming  something  in  their  hearing, 
whether  they  are  in  the  waking  or  in  the  sleeping  state, 
so  that  they  are  ready  to  state  that  they  actually  saw 
happen  what  was  asserted.1 

So  much  as  to  the  several  manners  and  circumstances 
of  childish  lying.  In  order  to  understand  still  better 
what  it  amounts  to,  how  much  of  conscious  falsehood 
•enters  into  it,  we  must  glance  at  another  and  closely  re- 
lated phenomenon,  the  pain  which  sometimes  attends 
and  follows  it. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  a  certain  number  of  children 
experience  a  qualm  of  conscience  when  uttering  a  falsehood. 
This  is  evidenced  in  the  well-known  devices  by  which  the 
intelligence  of  the  child  thinks  to  mitigate  the  lie  ;  as  when 

1  M.  Motet  was  one  of  the  first  to  call  attention  to  the  forces  of 
childish  imagination  and  the  effects  of  suggestion  in  the  false  testi- 
monies of  children.  Lcs  Faux  Temoignages  des  Enfants  devant  la 
Justice,  1887.  The  subject  has  been  further  elucidated  by  Dr. 
Berillon. 


262  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

on  saying  what  he  knows  to  be  false  he  adds  mentally, 
'I  do  not  mean  it,'  'in  my  mind,'  or  some  similar  palli- 
ative.1 Such  subterfuges  show  a  measure  of  sensibility, 
for  a  hardened  liar  would  despise  the  shifts,  and  are 
curious  as  illustrations  of  the  childish  conscience  and  its 
unlearnt  casuistry. 

The  remorse  that  sometimes  follows  lying,  especially 
the  first  lie,  which  catches  the  conscience  at  its  tenderest, 
has  been  remembered  by  many  in  later  life.  Here  is  a 
case.  A  lady  friend  remembers  that  when  a  child  of 
four  she  had  to  wear  a  shade  over  her  eyes.  One  day  on 
walking  out  with  her  mother  she  was  looking,  child-wise, 
sidewards  instead  of  in  front,  and  nearly  struck  a  lamp- 
post. Her  mother  then  scolded  her,  but  presently  re- 
membering the  eyes,  said  :  "  Poor  child,  you  could  not  see 
well  ".  She  knew  that  this  was  not  the  reason,  but  she 
accepted  it,  and  for  long  afterwards  was  tormented  with  a 
sense  of  having  told  a  lie.  Miss  Wiltshire,  who  tells  the 
story  of  the  mythical  snake,  gives  another  recollection 
which  illustrates  the  keen  suffering  of  a  child  when  he 
becomes  fully  conscious  of  falsehood.  She  was  as  a  small 
child  very  fond  of  babies,  and  had  been  permitted  by  her 
mother  to  go  when  invited  by  her  aunt  to  nurse  her  baby 
cousin.  One  day  wanting  much  to  go  when  not  invited, 
she  boldy  invented,  saying  that  her  aunt  was  busy  and 
had  asked  her  to  spend  an  hour  with  the  baby.  '  I  went 
(she  adds)  not  to  the  baby,  but  by  a  circuitous  route  to 
my  father's  barn,  crept  behind  one  of  the  great  doors, 
which  I  drew  as  close  to  me  as  I  could,  vainly  wishing 
that  the  barn  and  the  hay-stacks  would  cover  me  ;  then 
I  cried  and  moaned  I  do  not  know  how  many  hours,  and 
when  I  went  to  bed  I  said  my  prayers  between  sobs, 
refusing  to  tell  my  mother  why  I  wept.'2 

Such  examples  of  remorse   are   evidence   of  a  child's- 

1  See  Stanley  Hall,  loc.  cit.,  p.  68  f. 

2  Loc.  cit. 


RAW    MATERIAL   OF    MORALITY.  263 

capability  of  knowingly  stating  what  is  false.  This  is 
strikingly  shown  in  Miss  Wiltshire's  two  reminiscences  ; 
for  she  distinctly  tells  us  that  in  the  case  of  her  confident 
assertion  about  the  imaginary  snake  with  ring  and  bell, 
she  felt  no  remorse  as  she  was  not  conscious  of  uttering  a 
lie.1  But  these  sufferings  of  conscience  point  to  something 
else,  a  sense  of  awful  wickedness,  of  having  done  violence 
to  all  that  is  right  and  holy.  How,  it  may  be  asked,  does 
it  happen  that  children  feel  thus  morally  crushed  after 
telling  a  lie  ? 

Here  is  a  question  that  can  only  be  answered  when 
we  have  more  material.  We  know  that  among  all  childish 
offences  lying  is  the  one  which  is  apt  to  be  specially 
branded  by  theological  sanctions.  The  physical  torments 
with  which  the  'lying  tongue'  is  threatened,  may  well 
beget  terror  in  a  timid  child's  heart.  I  think  it  likely,  too, 
that  the  awfulness  of  lying  is  thought  of  by  children  in  its 
relation  to  the  all-seeing  God  who,  though  he  cannot  be 
lied  to,  knows  when  we  lie.  The  inaudible  palliative 
words  added  to  the  lie  may  be  an  awkward  child-device 
for  putting  the  speaker  straight  with  the  all-hearing 
God. 

Further  inquiry  is,  however,  needed  here.  Do  children 
contract  a  horror  of  a  lie  when  no  religious  terrors  are 
introduced  ?  Is  there  anything  in  the  workings  of  a  child's 
own  mind  which  would  lead  him  to  feel  after  his  first  lie  as 
if  the  stable  world  were  tumbling  about  his  ears  ?  Let 
parents  supply  us  with  facts  here. 

Meanwhile  I  will  venture  to  put  forth  a  conjecture,  and 
will  gladly  withdraw  it  as  soon  as  it  is  disproved. 

So  far  as  my  inquiries  have  gone  I  do  not  find  that 
children  brought  up  at  home  and  kept  from  the  contagion 
of  bad  example  do  uniformly  develop  a  lying  propensity. 
Several  mothers  assure  me  that  their  children  have  never 
seriously  propounded  an  untruth.  I  can  say  the  same 

1  Cf.  what  Mrs.  Fry  says,  Uninitiated  ('  A  Discovery  in  Morals')- 


264  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

about  two  children  who  have  been  especially  observed  for 
the  purpose.1 

This  being  so,  I  distinctly  challenge  the  assertion  that 
lying  is  instinctive  in  the  sense  that  a  child,  even  when 
brought  up  among  habitual  truth-tellers,  shows  an  unlearned 
aptitude  to  say  what  he  knows  to  be  false.  A  child's  quick 
imitativeness  will,  of  course,  lead  him  to  copy  grown-up 
people's  untruths  at  a  very  early  age.- 

I  will  go  further  and  suggest  that  where  a  child  is 
brought  up  normally,  that  is,  in  a  habitually  truth-speaking 
community,  he  tends,  quite  apart  from  moral  instruction,  to 
acquire  a  respect  for  truth  as  what  is  customary.  Consider 
for  a  moment  how  busily  a  child's  mind  is  occupied  during 
the  first  years  of  linguistic  performance  in  getting  at  the 
bottom  of  words,  of  fitting  ideas  to  words  when  trying  to 
understand  others,  and  words  to  ideas  when  trying  to 
express  his  own  thoughts,  and  you  will  see  that  all  this 
must  serve  to  make  truth,  that  is,  the  correspondence  of 
statement  with  fact,  to  the  child-mind  something  matter- 
of-course,  something  not  to  be  questioned,  a  law  wrought 
into  the  very  usages  of  daily  life  which  he  never  thinks  of 
disobeying.  We  can  see  that  children  accustomed  to  truth- 
speaking  show  all  the  signs  of  a  moral  shock  when  they 
are  confronted  with  assertions  which,  as  they  see,  do  not 
answer  to  fact.  The  child  C.  was  highly  indignant  on 
hearing  from  his  mother  that  people  said  what  he  considered 
false  things  about  horses  and  other  matters  of  interest :  and 
he  was  even  more  indignant  at  meeting  with  any  such 
falsity  in  one  of  his  books  for  which  he  had  all  a  child's 
reverence.  The  idea  of  perpetrating  a  knowing  untruth,  so 

1  Stanley   Hall,  when   he  speaks  of  certain  forms  of  lying   as 
prevalent  among  children,  is,  as  he  expressly  explains,  speaking  of 
children  at  school,  where  the  forces  of  contagion  are  in  full  swing.  % 

2  I  seem  to  detect  possible  openings  for  the  play  of  imitation  in 
many  of  the  indisputably  conscious  falsehoods  reported  by  Perez,  P. 
Lombroso,  and  others. 


RAW   MATERIAL   OF    MORALITY.  265 

far  as  I  can  judge,  is  simply  awful  to  a  child  who  has  been 
thoroughly  habituated  to  the  practice  of  truthful  statement. 
May  it,  then,  not  well  be  that  when  a  preternatural  pressure 
of  circumstances  pushes  the  child  over  the  boundary  line 
of  truth,  he  feels  a  shock,  a  horror,  a  giddy  and  aching 
sense  of  having  violated  law — law  not  wholly  imposed 
by  the  mother's  command,  but  rooted  in  the  very  habits 
of  social  life  ?  I  think  the  conjecture  is  well  worth  con- 
sidering. 

Our  inquiry  has  led  us  to  recognise,  in  the  case  of 
cruelty  and  of  lying  alike,  that  children  are  by  no  means 
morally  perfect,  but  have  tendencies  which,  if  not  counter- 
acted or  held  in  check  by  others,  will  develop  into  true 
cruelty  and  true  lying.  On  the  other  hand,  our  study  has 
shown  us  that  these  impulses  are  not  the  only  ones.  A 
child  has  promptings  of  kindness,  which  alternate,  often  in 
a  capricious-looking  way,  with  those  of  inconsiderate  teasing 
and  tormenting  ;  and  he  has,  I  hold,  side  by  side  with  the 
imaginative  and  other  tendencies  which  make  for  un- 
truthful statement,  the  instinctive  roots  of  a  respect  for 
truth.  These  tendencies  have  not  the  same  relative  strength 
and  frequency  of  utterance  in  the  case  of  all  children,  some 
showing,  for  example,  more  of  the  impulse  which  makes  for 
truth,  others  more  of  the  impulse  which  makes  for  untruth. 
Yet  in  all  children  probably  both  kinds  of  impulse  are 
to  be  observed. 

I  have  confined  myself  to  two  of  the  moral  traits  of 
childhood.  If  there  were  time  to  go  into  an  examination 
of  others,  as  childish  vanity,  something  similar  would,  I 
think,  be  found.  Children's  vanity,  like  that  of  the  savage, 
has  been  the  theme  of  more  than  one  chapter,  and  it  is  un- 
doubtedly vast  to  the  point  of  absurdity.  Yet,  side  by 
side  with  these  impulses  to  deck  oneself,  to  talk  boast- 
fully, there  exists  a  delightful  childish  candour  which,  if 
not  exactly  what  we  call  modesty,  is  possibly  something 
better. 


266  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

We  may  then,  perhaps,  draw  the  conclusion  that  child- 
nature  is  on  its  moral  side  wanting  in  consistency  and 
unity.  It  is  a  field  of  half-formed  growths,  some  of  which 
tend  to  choke  the  others.  Certain  of  these  are  favourable, 
others  unfavourable  to  morality.  It  is  for  education  to  see 
to  it  that  these  isolated  propensities  be  organised  into  a 
system  in  which  those  towards  the  good  become  supreme 
and  regulative  principles. 


267 


VIII. 

UNDER  LAW. 

The  Struggle  with  Law. 

IN  the  last  chapter  we  tried  to  get  at  those  tendencies  of 
child-nature  which  though  they  have  a  certain  moral 
significance  may  in  a  manner  be  called  spontaneous  and 
independent  of  the  institution  of  moral  training.  We  will 
now  examine  the  child's  attitude  towards  the  moral  govern- 
ment with  which  he  finds  himself  confronted. 

Here  again  we  meet  with  opposite  views.  Children, 
say  some,  are  essentially  disobedient  and  law-breaking. 
A  child  as  such  is  a  rebel,  delighting  in  nothing  so  much 
as  in  evading  the  rule  which  he  finds  imposed  on  him  by 
others. 

The  view  that  children  are  instinctively  obedient  and 
law-abiding,  has  not,  I  think,  been  very  boldly  insisted  on. 
A  follower  of  Rousseau,  at  least,  who  sees  only  clumsy 
interference  with  natural  development  in  our  attempts  to 
govern  children,  would  say  that  child-nature  must  resist 
the  artificial  and  cramping  system  which  the  disciplinarian 
imposes. 

It  seems,  however,  to  be  allowed  by  some  that  a 
certain  number  of  children  are  docile  and  disposed  to 
accept  authority  with  its  commands.  According  to  these, 
children  are  either  obedient  or  disobedient.  This  is  per- 
haps the  view  of  many  mothers  and  pedagogues. 

Here,  too,  it  is  probable  that  we  try  to  make  nature 


268  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

too  simple.  Even  the  latter  view,  in  spite  of  its  apparent 
wish  to  be  discriminating,  does  not  allow  for  the  many- 
sidedness  of  the  child,  and  for  the  many  different  ways  in 
which  the  instincts  of  child-nature  may  vary. 

Now  it  is  worth  asking  whether,  if  the  child  were 
naturally  disposed  to  look  on  authority  as  something 
wholly  hostile,  he  would  get  morally  trained  at  all. 
Physically  mastered  and  morally  cowed  he  might  of  course 
become  ;  but  this  is  not  the  same  thing  as  being  morally 
induced  into  a  habit  of  accepting  law  and  obeying  it. 

In  inquiring  into  this  matter  we  must  begin  by  drawing 
a  distinction.  There  is  first  the  attitude  of  a  child  towards 
the  governor,  the  parent  or  other  guardian,  and  there  is  his 
attitude  towards  law  as  such.  These  are  by  no  means  the 
same  thing,  and  a  child  of  three  or  four  begins  to  illustrate 
the  distinction.  He  may  seem  to  be  lawless,  opposed  to 
the  very  idea  of  government,  when  in  reality  he  is  merely 
objecting  to  a  particular  ruler,  and  the  kind  of  rule  (or  as 
the  child  would  say,  misrule)  which  he  is  carrying  out. 

Let  us  look  a  little  into  the  non-compliant,  disobedient 
attitude  of  children.  As  we  have  seen,  their  very  liveli- 
ness, the  abundance  of  their  vigorous  impulses,  brings 
them  into  conflict  with  others'  wills.  The  ruler,  more  par- 
ticularly, is  a  great  and  continual  source  of  crossings  and 
checkings.  The  child  has  his  natural  wishes  and  propen- 
sities. He  is  full  of  fun,  bent  on  his  harmless  tricks,  and 
the  mother  has  to  talk  seriously  to  him  about  being  naughty. 
How  can  we  wonder  at  his  disliking  the  constraint?  He  has 
a  number  of  inconvenient,  active  impulses,  such  as  putting 
things  in  disorder,  playing  with  water,  and  so  forth.  As  we 
all  know,  he  has  a  duck-like  fondness  for  dirty  puddles. 
Civilisation,  which  wills  that  a  child  should  be  nicely  dressed 
and  clean,  intervenes  in  the  shape  of  the  nurse  and  soon 
puts  a  stop  to  this  mode  of  diversion.  The  tyro  in  submis- 
sion, if  sound  in  brain  and  limb,  kicks  against  the  restraint, 
yells,  slaps  the  nurse,  and  so  forth. 


UNDER   LAW.  269 

Such  collisions  are  perfectly  normal  in  the  first  years  of 
life.  We  should  not  care  to  see  a  child  give  up  his  inclina- 
tions at  another's  bidding  without  some  little  show  of  resist- 
ance. These  conflicts  are  frequent  and  sharp  in  proportion 
to  the  sanity  and  vigour  of  the  child.  The  best  children, 
best  from  a  biological  point  of  view,  have,  I  think,  most  of 
the  rebel  in  them.  Not  infrequently  these  resistances  of 
young  will  to  old  will  are  accompanied  by  more  emphatic 
protests  in  the  shape  of  slapping,  pushing,  and  even  biting. 
The  ridiculous  inequality  in  bodily  powers,  however,  saves,  or 
ought  to  save,  the  contest  from  becoming  a  serious  physical 
struggle.  The  resistance  where  superior  force  is  used  can 
only  resolve  itself  into  a  helpless  protest,  a  vain  shrieking  or 
other  utterance  of  checked  and  baffled  impulse. 

If  instead  of  physical  compulsion  authority  is  asserted 
in  the  shape  of  a  highly  disagreeable  command,  a  child, 
before  obedience  has  grown  into  a  habit,  will  be  likely  to 
disobey.  If  the  nurse,  instead  of  pulling  the  mite  away 
from  the  puddle,  bids  him  come  away,  he  may  assert  him- 
self in  an  eloquent  '  I  won't,"  or  less  bluntly,  '  I  can't  come 
yet'.  If  he  is  very  much  in  love  with  the  puddle,  and  has 
a  stout  heart,  he  probably  embarks  on  a  tussle  of  words,  in 
which  '  I  won't,'  or  as  the  child  will  significantly  put  it  '  I 
mustn't,'  is  bandied  with  'you  must!'  the  nurse  having  at 
length  to  abandon  the  '  moral '  method  and  to  resort  after 
all  to  physical  compulsion. 

Our  sample-child  has  not,  we  will  assume,  yet  got  so 
far  as  to  recognise  and  defer  to  a  general  rule  about  cleanli- 
ness. Hence  it  may  be  said  that  his  opposition  is  directed 
against  the  nurse  as  propounding  a  particular  command, 
and  one  which  at  the  moment  is  excessively  unpleasant. 
It  is  as  yet  not  resistance  to  law  as  such,  but  rather  to  one 
specific  interference  of  another  will. 

At  the  same  time  we  may  detect  in  some  of  this  early 
resistance  to  authority  something  of  the  true  rebel-nature, 
that  is  to  say  the  love  of  lawlessness,  and  what  is  worse, 


270  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

perhaps,  the  obstinate  recklessness  of  the  law-breaker. 
The  very  behaviour  of  a  child  when  another  will  crosses 
and  blocks  the  line  of  his  activity  is  suggestive  of  this. 
The  yelling  and  other  disorderly  proceedings,  do  not  they 
speak  of  the  temper  of  the  rioter,  of  the  rowdy  ?  And  then, 
the  fierce  persistence  in  disobedience  under  rebuke,  and  the 
wild,  wicked  determination  to  face  everything  rather  than 
obey,  are  not  these  marks  of  an  almost  Satanic  fierceness  of 
revolt  ?  The  thoroughly  naughty  child  sticks  at  nothing. 
Thus  a  little  offender  of  four  when  he  was  reminded  by 
his  sister — two  years  older — that  he  would  be  shut  out  from 
heaven  retorted  impiously,  '  I  don't  care,'  adding :  '  Uncle 
won't  go — I'll  stay  with  him  '. l 

This  fierce  noisy  utterance  of  the  disobedient  and  law- 
resisting  temper  is  eminently  impressive.  Yet  it  is  not  the 
only  utterance.  If  we  observe  children  who  may  be  said 
to  show  on  the  whole  an  outward  submission  to  authority 
we  shall  discover  signs  of  secret  dissatisfaction  and  antagon- 
ism. The  conflict  with  rule  has  not  wholly  ceased  :  it  has 
simply  changed  its  manner  of  proceeding,  physical  assault 
and  riotous  shouts  of  defiance  being  now  exchanged  for 
dialectic  attack. 

A  curious  chapter  in  the  psychology  of  the  child  which 
still  has  to  be  written  is  the  account  of  the  various  devices 
by  which  the  astute  little  novice  called  upon  to  wear  the 
yoke  of  authority  seeks  to  smooth  its  chafing  asperities. 
These  devices  may,  perhaps,  be  summed  up  under  the  head 
of  "  trying  it  on  ". 

One  of  the  simplest  and  most  obvious  of  these  con- 
trivances is  the  extempore  invention  of  an  excuse  for  not 
instantly  obeying  a  particular  command.  A  child  soon 
finds  out  that  to  say  '  I  won't '  when  he  is  bidden  to  do 
something  is  indiscreet  as  well  as  vulgar.  He  wants  to 
have  his  own  way  without  resorting  to  a  gross  breach  of 

1  My  correspondent,  discreetly  perhaps,  does  not  explain  why 
the  uncle  was  selected  as  fellow-outcast. 


UNDER   LAW.  2/1 

good  manners,  so  he  replies  insinuatingly,  '  I's  very  sorry, 
but  I's  too  busy,'  or  in  some  such  conciliatory  words.  This 
field  of  invention  offers  a  fine  opportunity  for  the  imagina- 
tive child.  A  small  boy  of  three  years  and  nine  months  on 
receiving  from  his  nurse  the  familiar  order,  "  Come  here  !  " 
at  once  replied,  "  I  can't,  nurse,  I's  looking  for  a  flea," 
and  pretended  to  be  much  engrossed  in  the  momentous 
business  of  hunting  for  this  quarry  in  the  blanket  of  his  cot.1 
The  little  trickster  is  such  a  lover  of  fun  that  he  is  pretty 
certain  to  betray  his  ruse  in  a  case  like  this,  and  our  small 
flea-catcher,  we  are  told,  laughed  mischievously  as  he 
proffered  his  excuse.  Such  sly  fabrications  may  be  just  as 
naughty  as  the  uninspired  excuses  of  a  stupidly  sulky  child, 
but  it  is  hard  to  be  quite  as  much  put  out  by  them. 

These  excuses  often  show  a  fine  range  of  inventive 
activity.  How  manifold,  for  example,  are  the  reasons, 
more  or  less  fictitious,  which  a  boy  when  told  to  make  less 
noise  is  able  to  urge  in  favour  of  non-compliance.  Here, 
of  course,  all  the  great  matters  of  the  play-world,  the  need 
of  getting  his  'gee-gee'  on,  of  giving  his  orders  to  his  soldiers, 
and  so  forth,  come  in  between  the  prohibition  and  com- 
pliance, and  disobedience  in  such  cases  has  its  excuses. 
For  to  the  child  his  play-world,  even  though  in  a  manner 
modelled  on  the  pattern  of  our  common  world,  is  apart  and 
sacred  ;  and  the  conventional  restraints  as  to  noise  and  such 
like  borrowed  from  the  every-day  world  seem  to  him  to  be 
quite  out  of  place  in  this  free  and  private  domain  of  his 
own. 

We  all  know  the  child's  aptness  in  '  easing '  the  pressure 
of  commands  and  prohibitions.  If,  for  example,  he  is  told 
to  keep  perfectly  quiet  because  mother  or  father  wants  to 
sleep,  he  will  prettily  plead  for  the  reservation  of  whispering 
ever  so  softly.  If  he  is  bidden  not  to  ask  for  things  at  the 

1  Cf.  the  excuse  given  by  a  little  girl  of  three  when  her  grand- 
mother called  her,  "  I  can't  come,  I  am  suckling  baby  "  (the  doll). 
P.  Lombroso,  op.  cit.,  p.  126. 


2/2  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

table  he  will  resort  to  sly  indirect  reminders  of  what  he 
wants,  as  when  a  boy  of  five  and  a  half  years  whispered 
audibly  :  '  I  hope  somebody  will  offer  me  some  more  soup/ 
or  when  a  girl  of  three  and  a  half  years,  with  still  greater 
childish  tact,  observed  on  seeing  the  elder  folk  eating  cake  : 
'  I  not  asking'.  This  last  may  be  compared  with  a  story 
told  by  Rousseau  of  a  little  girl  of  six  years  who,  having 
eaten  of  all  the  dishes  but  one,  artfully  indicated  the  fact  by 
pointing  in  turn  to  each  of  the  dishes,  saying :  '  I  have  eaten 
that,'  but  carefully  passing  by  the  untasted  one.1  When 
more  difficult  duties  come  to  be  enforced  and  the  neophyte 
in  the  higher  morality  is  bidden  to  be  considerate  for  others, 
and  even  to  sacrifice  his  own  comfort  for  theirs,  he  is  apt 
to  manifest  a  good  deal  of  skill  in  adjusting  the  counsel 
of  perfection  to  young  weakness.  Here  is  an  amusing 
example.  A  little  boy,  Edgar  by  name,  aged  five  and 
three-quarter  years,  was  going  out  to  take  tea  with  some 
little  girls.  His  mother,  as  is  usual  on  such  occasions, 
primed  him  with  special  directions  as  to  behaviour,  saying : 
"  Remember  to  give  way  to  them  like  father  does  to  me". 
To  which  Edgar,  after  thinking  a  brief  instant,  replied  : 
"  Oh,  but  not  all  at  once.  You  have  to  persuade  him." 

A  like  astuteness  will  show  itself  in  meeting  accusation. 
The  various  ways  in  which  a  child  will  seek  to  evade  the 
point  in  such  cases  are  truly  marvellous  and  show  the  child- 
ish intelligence  at  its  ablest. 

Sometimes  the  dreary  talking  to,  with  its  well-known 
deep  accusatory  tones,  its  familiar  pleadings, '  How  can  you 
be  so  naughty?'  and  the  rest  is  daringly  ignored.  After 
keeping  up  an  excellent  appearance  of  listening  the  little 
culprit  will  proceed  in  the  most  artless  way  to  talk  about  some- 
thing more  agreeable.  This  is  trying,  but  is  not  the  worst. 
The  deepest  depth  of  maternal  humiliation  is  reached  when 

1  Entile,  livre  v.,  quoted  by  Perez,  L'Art  et  la  Poesie  chez  PEn/ant, 
p.  127.  Rousseau  uses  this  story  in  order  to  show  that  girls  are 
more  artful  than  boys. 


UNDER   LAW.  273 

a  carefully  prepared  and  solemnly  delivered  homily  is  re- 
warded by  a  tu  quoquc  in  the  shape  of  a  correction  of  some- 
thing in  the  delivery  which  offends  the  child's  sense  of  pro- 
priety. This  befel  one  mother  who,  after  talking  seriously 
to  her  little  boy  about  some  fault,  was  met  with  this  remark: 
"  Mamma,  when  you  talk  you  don't  move  your  upper  jaw". 

It  is  of  course  difficult  to  say  how  far  a  child's  interrup- 
tions and  what  look  like  turnings  of  the  conversation  when 
receiving  rebuke  are  the  result  of  deliberate  plotting.  We 
know  it  is  hard  to  hold  the  young  thoughts  long  on  any 
subject,  and  the  homily  makes  a  heavy  demand  in  this 
respect,  and  its  theme  is  apt  to  seem  dull  to  a  child's  lively 
brain.  The  thoughts  will  be  sure  to  wander  then,  and  the 
rude  interruptions  and  digressions  may  after  all  be  but  the 
natural  play  of  the  young  mind.  I  fear,  however,  that  de- 
sign often  has  a  hand  here.  The  first  digression  to  which 
the  weak  disciplinarian  succumbed  may  have  been  the  result 
of  a  spontaneous  flow  of  childish  ideas  :  but  its  success  en- 
ables the  observant  child  to  try  it  on  a  second  time  with 
artful  aim. 

In  cases  in  which  no  attempt  is  made  to  ignore  the 
accusation,  the  small  wits  are  busy  discovering  palliatives 
and  exculpations.  Here  we  have  the  many  ruses,  often 
crude  enough,  by  which  the  little  culprit  tries  to  shake  off" 
moral  responsibility,  to  deny  the  authorship  of  the  action 
found  fault  with.  The  blame  is  put  on  anybody  or  any- 
thing. When  he  breaks  something,  say  a  cup,  and  is 
scolded,  he  saves  himself  by  saying  it  was  because  the  cup 
was  not  made  strong  enough,  or  because  the  maid  put  it 
too  near  the  edge  of  the  table.  There  are  clear  indications 
of  fatalistic  thought  in  these  childish  disclaimers.  Things 
were  so  conditioned  that  he  could  not  help  doing  what  he 
did.  This  fatalism  betrays  itself  in  the  childish  subterfuges 
already  referred  to,  by  which  the  ego  tries  to  screen  itself 
shabbily  by  throwing  responsibility  on  to  the  bodily 
agents.  This  device  is  sometimes  hit  upon  very  early. 

18 


274  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

A  wee  child  of  two  when  told  not  to  cry  gasped  out : 
"  Elsie  cry — not  Elsie  cry — tears  cry — naughty  tears  !  " 
This,  it  must  be  allowed,  is  more  plausible  than  C.'s  lame 
attempt  to  put  off  responsibility  for  some  naughty  action 
on  his  hands.  For  our  tears  are  in  a  sense  apart  from  us, 
and  in  the  first  years  are  wholly  beyond  control. 

The  fatalistic  form  of  exculpation  meets  us  later  on 
under  the  familiar  form,  '  God  made  me  like  that '.  A 
boy  of  three  was  blamed  for  leaving  his  crusts,  and  his 
conduct  contrasted  with  that  of  his  model  papa.  Where- 
upon he  observed  with  a  touch  of  metaphysical  precocity : 
"  Yes,  but,  papa,  you  see  God  had  made  you  and  me 
different ". 

These  denials  of  authorship  occur  when  a  charge  is 
brought  home  and  no  clear  justification  of  the  action  is 
forthcoming.  In  many  cases  the  shrewd  intelligence  of  the 
child — which  is  never  so  acute  as  in  this  art  of  moral  self- 
defence — discovers  justificatory  reasons.  In  such  a  case 
the  attitude  is  a  very  different  one.  It  is  no  longer  the 
helpless  lifting  of  hands  of  the  irresponsible  one,  but 
the  bold  steady  glance  of  one  who  is  prepared  to  defend 
his  action. 

Sometimes  these  justifications  are  pitiful  examples  of 
quibbling.  A  boy  had  been  rough  with  his  baby  brother. 
His  mother  chid  him,  telling  him  he  might  hurt  baby. 
He  then  asked  his  mother,  '  Isn't  he  my  own  brother?'  and 
on  his  mother  admitting  so  incontestable  a  proposition, 
exclaimed  triumphantly,  "  Well,  you  said  I  could  do  what  I 
liked  with  my  own  things  ".  The  idea  of  the  precious  baby 
being  a  boy's  own  to  do  what  he  likes  with  is  so  remote 
from  older  people's  conceptions  that  it  seems  impossible 
to  credit  the  boy  with  misunderstanding.  We  ought,  perhaps, 
to  set  him  down  as  a  depraved  little  sophist  and  destined— 
but  predictions  happily  lie  outside  our  metier. 

In  some  cases  these  justifications  have  a  dreadful  look 
of  being  after-thoughts  invented  for  the  express  purpose  of 


UNDER    LAW.  2/5 

•self-protection  and  knowingly  put  forward  as  fibs.  Yet 
there  is  need  of  a  wise  discrimination  here.  Take,  for 
example,  the  following  from  the. Worcester  Collection.  A 
boy  of  three  was  told  by  his  mother  to  stay  and  mind  his 
baby-sister  while  she  went  downstairs.  On  going  up  again 
some  time  after  she  met  him  on  the  stairs.  "  Being  asked 
why  he  had  left  the  baby  he  said  there  was  a  bumble-bee 
in  the  room  and  he  was  afraid  he  would  get  stung  if  he 
stayed  there.  His  mother  asked  him  if  he  wasn't  afraid 
his  little  sister  would  get  stung.  He  said,  '  Yes,'  but  added 
that  if  he  stayed  in  the  room  the  bee  might  sting  them 
both,  and  then  she  would  have  two  to  take  care  of."  Now 
with  every  wish  to  be  charitable  I  cannot  bring  myself  to 
think  that  the  small  boy  had  really  gone  through  that 
subtle  process  of  disinterested  calculation  before  vacating 
the  room  in  favour  of  the  bumble-bee,  if  indeed  there  was 
a  bumble-bee.  To  be  caught  in  the  act  and  questioned  is, 
I  suspect,  a  situation  particularly  productive  of  such  specious 
fibbing. 

One  other  illustration  of  this  keen  childish  dialectic  when 
face  to  face  with  the  accuser  deserves  to  be  touched  on. 
The  sharp  little  wits  have  something  of  a  lawyer's  quick- 
ness in  detecting  a  flaw  in  the  indictment.  Any  exaggera- 
tion into  which  a  feeling  of  indignation  happens  to  betray 
the  accuser  is  instantly  pounced  upon.  If,  for  example,  a 
child  is  scolded  for  pulling  kitty's  ears  and  making  her  cry 
it  is  enough  for  the  little  stickler  for  accuracy  to  be  able  to 
say :  '  I  wasn't  pulling  kitty's  ears,  I  was  only  pulling  one 
of  her  ears '.  This  ability  to  deny  the  charge  in  its  initial 
form  gives  the  child  a  great  advantage,  and  robs  the  accu- 
sation in  its  amended  form  of  much  of  its  sting.  Whence, 
by  the  way,  one  may  infer  that  wisdom  in  managing 
children  shows  itself  in  nothing  more  than  in  a  scrupulous 
exactness  in  the  use  of  words. 

While  there  are  these  isolated  attacks  on  various  points 
of  the  daily  discipline,  we  see  now  and  again  a  bolder  line 


2/6  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

of  action  in  the  shape  of  a  general  protest  against  its- 
severity.  Children  have  been  known  to  urge  that  the 
punishments  inflicted  on  them  are  ineffectual  ;  and,  al- 
though their  opinion  on  such  matters  is  hardly  disinterested, 
it  is  sometimes  pertinent  enough.  An  American  boy  aged 
five  years  ten  months  began  to  cry  because  he  was  for- 
bidden to  go  into  the  yard  to  play,  and  was  threatened  by 
his  mother  with  a  whipping.  Whereupon  he  observed  .~ 
"  Well  now,  mamma,  that  will  only  make  me  cry  more ''. 

These  childish  protests  are,  as  we  know,  wont  to  be  met 
by  the  commonplaces  about  the  affection  which  prompts 
the  correction.  But  the  child  finds  it  hard  to  swallow 
these  subtleties.  For  him  love  is  love,  that  is  caressing, 
and  doing  everything  for  his  present  enjoyment  ;  and  here 
is  the  mother  who  says  she  loves  him,  and  often  acts  as 
if  she  did,  transforming  herself  into  an  ogre  to  torment 
him  and  make  him  miserable.  He  may  accept  her  assur- 
ance that  she  scolds  and  chastises  him  because  she  is  a 
good  mother  ;  only  he  is  apt  to  wish  that  she  were  a  shade 
less  good.  A  boy  of  four  had  one  morning  to  remain  in 
bed  till  ten  o'clock  as  a  punishment  for  misbehaviour. 
He  proceeded  to  address  his  mother  in  this  wise  :  "  If  I  had 
any  little  children  I'd  be  a  worse  mother  than  you — I'd 
be  quite  a  bad  mother  ;  I'd  let  the  children  get  up  directly 
I  had  done  my  breakfast  at  any  rate".  If,  on  the  other 
hand,  the  mother  puts  forward  her  own  comfort  as  the 
ground  of  the  restraint  she  may  be  met  by  this  kind  of 
thing :  "  I  wish  you'd  be  a  little  more  self-sacrificing  and 
let  me  make  a  noise  ". 

Enough  has  been  said  to  illustrate  the  ways  in  which 
the  natural  child  kicks  against  the  imposition  of  restraints 
on  his  free  activity.  He  begins  by  showing  himself  an  open 
foe  to  authority.  For  a  long  time  after,  while  making  a 
certain  show  of  submission,  he  harbours  in  his  breast  some- 
thing of  the  rebel's  spirit.  He  does  his  best  to  evade  the 
most  galling  parts  of  the  daily  discipline,  and  displays  an 


UNDER   LAW.  2/7 

admirable  ingenuity  in  devising  excuses  for  apparent  acts 
of  insubordination.  Where  candour  is  permitted  he  is  apt 
to  prove  himself  an  exceedingly  acute  critic  of  the  system 
which  is  imposed  on  him. 

All  this,  moreover,  seems  to  show  that  a  child  objects 
not  only  to  the  particular  administration  under  which  he 
happens  to  live,  but  to  all  law  as  implying  restraints  on  free 
activity.  Thus,  from  the  child's  point  of  view,  so  far  as  we 
have  yet  examined  it,  punishment  as  such  is  a  thing  which 
ought  not  to  be. 

So  strong  and  deep-reaching  is  this  antagonism  to  law 
and  its  restraints  apt  to  be  that  the  childish  longing  to  be 
'big'  is,  I  believe,  grounded  on  the  expectation  of  liberty. 
To  be  big  seems  to  the  child  more  than  anything  else  to 
be  rid  of  all  this  imposition  of  commands,  to  be  able  to  do 
what  one  likes  without  interference  from  others.  This 
longing  may  grow  intense  in  the  breast  of  a  quite  small 
•child.  "  Do  you  know,"  asked  a  little  fellow  of  four  years, 
"what  I  shall  do  when  I'm  a  big  man  ?  I'll  go  to  a  shop 
and  buy  a  bun  and  pick  out  all  the  currants."  This  funny 
story  is  characteristic  of  the  movements  of  young  desire. 
The  small  prohibition  not  to  pick  out  the  currants  is  one 
that  may  chafe  to  soreness  a  child's  sensibility. 

On  the  Side  of  Law. 

If,  however,  we  look  closer  we  shall  find  that  this  hostility 
is  not  the  whole,  perhaps  not  the  most  fundamental  part  of 
the  child's  attitude.  It  is  evident,  to  begin  with,  that  a 
good  deal  of  this  early  criticism  of  parental  government,  so 
far  from  implying  rejection  of  all  rule,  plainly  implies  its 
acceptance.  Some  of  the  earliest  and  bitterest  protests 
against  interference  are  directed  against  what  looks  to  the 
child  irregular  or  opposed  to  law.  He  is  allowed,  for  ex- 
ample, for  some  time  to  use  a  pair  of  scissors  as  a  plaything, 
-and  is  then  suddenly  deprived  of  it,  his  mother  having  now 
first  discovered  the  unsuitability  of  the  plaything.  In  such  a 


2/8  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

case  the  passionate  outburst  and  the  long  bitter  protest  attest 
the  sense  of  injustice,  the  violation  of  custom  and  unwritten 
law.  Again,  the  keen  resentful  opposition  of  the  child  ta 
the  look  of  anything  like  unfairness  and  partiality  in  parental 
government  shows  that  he  has  a  jealous  feeling  of  regard  for 
the  universality  and  the  inviolableness  of  law.  Much,  too, 
of  the  criticism  dealt  with  above,  reveals  a  fundamental 
acknowledgment  of  law — at  least  for  the  purposes  of  the 
argument.  Thus  the  very  attempt  to  establish  an  excuse,  a 
justification,  may  be  said  to  be  a  tacit  admission  that  if  the 
action  had  been  done  as  alleged  it  would  have  been  naughty 
and  deserving  of  punishment.  In  truth  the  small  person's 
challengings  of  the  modus  operandi  of  his  mother's  rule,  just 
because  they  are  often  in  a  true  sense  ethical,  clearly  start 
from  the  assumption  of  rules,  and  of  the  distinction  of  right 
and  wrong. 

This  of  itself  shows  that  there  are  in  the  child  compliant 
as  well  as  non-compliant  tendencies  towards  law  and 
.towards  authority  so  far  as  this  is  lawful.  We  may  now 
pass  to  other  parts  of  a  child's  behaviour  which  help  to. 
make  more  clear  the  existence  of  such  law-abiding  im- 
pulses. 

Here  we  may  set  out  with  those  exhibitions  of  some- 
thing like  remorse  which  often  follow  disobedience  and 
punishment  in  the  first  tender  years.  These  may,  at  first, 
be  little  more  than  physical  reactions,  due  to  the  exhaustion 
of  the  passionate  outbursts.  But  they  soon  begin  to  show 
traces  of  new  feelings.  A  child  in  disgrace,  before  he  has 
a  clear  moral  sense  of  shame,  suffers  through  a  feeling  of 
estrangement,  of  loneliness,  of  self- restriction.  If  the 
habitual  relation  between  mother  and  child  is  a  loving  and 
happy  one  the  situation  becomes  exceedingly  painful.  The 
pride  and  obstinacy  notwithstanding,  the  culprit  feels  that 
he  is  cut  off  from  more  than  one  half  of  his  life,  that  his 
beautiful  world  is  laid  in  ruins.  The  same  little  boy  who 
said  :  '  I'd  be  a  worse  mother,'  remarked  to  his  mother  a 


UNDER   LAW.  279 

few  months  later  that  if  he  could  say  what  he  liked  to  God 
it  would  be  :  '  Love  me  when  I'm  naughty'.  I  think  one 
can  hardly  conceive  of  a  more  eloquent  testimony  to  the 
suffering  of  the  child  in  the  lonesome,  loveless  state  of 
punishment. 

Is  there  any  analogue  of  our  sense  of  remorse  in  this 
early  suffering  ?  The  question  of  an  instinctive  moral  sense 
in  children  is  a  perplexing  one,  and  I  do  not  propose  to 
discuss  it  now.  I  would  only  venture  to  suggest  that  in 
these  poignant  griefs  of  child-life  there  seem  to  be  signs  of 
a  consciousness  of  violated  instincts.  This  is,  no  doubt,  in 
part  the  smarting  of  a  loving  heart  on  remembering  its  un- 
loving action.  But  there  may  be  more  than  this.  A  child 
of  four  or  five  is,  I  conceive,  quite  capable  of  reflecting  at 
such  a  time  that  in  his  fits  of  naughtiness  he  has  broken 
with  his  normal  orderly  self,  that  he  has  set  at  defiance  that 
which  he  customarily  honours  and  obeys. 

What,  it  may  be  asked,  are  these  instincts  ?  In  their 
earliest  discernible  form  they  seem  to  me  to  be  respect  for- 
rule,  for  a  regular  manner  of  proceeding  as  opposed  to  an 
irregular.  A  child,  as  I  understand  the  little  sphinx,  is  at 
once'  the  subject  of  ever-changing  caprices — whence  the 
delight  in  playful  defiance  of  all  rule  and  order — and  the 
reverer  of  custom,  precedent,  rule.  And,  as  I  conceive,  this 
reverence  for  precedent  and  rule  is  the  deeper  and  stronger, 
holding  full  sway  in  his  serious  moments. 

If  this  view  is  correct  the  suffering  of  naughty  children 
is  not,  as  has  been  said  by  some,  wholly  the  result  of  the 
externals  of  discipline,  punishment,  and  the  loss  of  the  agree- 
able things  which  follow  good  behaviour,  though  this  is 
commonly  an  element ;  nor  is  it  merely  the  sense  of  loneli- 
ness and  lovelessness,  though  that  is  probably  a  large  slice 
of  it ;  but  it  contains  the  germ  of  something  nearer  a  true 
remorse,  vis.,  a  sense  of  normal  feelings  and  dispositions 
set  at  nought  and  contradicted. 

And  now  we  may  ask  what  evidence  there  is   for  the 


280  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

existence  of  this  respect  for  order  and  regularity  other  than 
that  afforded  by  the  childish  protests  against  apparent  in- 
consistencies in  the  administration  of  discipline. 

Mr.  Walter  Bagehot  tells  us  that  the  great  initial 
difficulty  in  the  formation  of  communities  was  the  fixing  of 
custom.  However  this  be  in  the  case  of  primitive  com- 
munities it  seems  to  me  indisputable  that  in  the  case  of  a 
child  brought  up  in  normal  surroundings  there  is  a  clearly 
observable  instinct  to  fall  in  with  a  common  mode  of 
behaviour. 

This  respect  for  custom  is  related  to  the  imitative 
instincts  of  the  child.  He  does  what  he  sees  others  do,  and 
so  tends  to  fall  in  with  their  manner  of  life.  We  all  know 
that  these  small  people  take  their  cue  from  their  elders  as 
to  what  is  allowable.  Hence  one  difficulty  of  moral  training. 
A  little  boy  when  two  years  and  one  month  old  had  happened 
to  see  his  mother  tear  a  piece  of  calico.  The  next  day  he 
was  discovered  to  have  taken  the  sheet  from  the  bed  and 
made  a  rent  in  it.  When  scolded,  he  replied  in  his  childish 
German,  '  Mamma  mach  put,'  i.e.,  '  macht  caput '  (breaks 
calico).  It  is  well  when  the  misleading  effect  of  '  example ' 
is  so  little  serious  as  it  was  in  this  case. 

In  addition  to  this  effect  of  others'  doings  in  making 
things  allowable  in  the  child's  eyes,  there  is  the  binding 
influence  of  a  repeated  regular  manner  of  proceeding. 
This  is  the  might  of  '  custom '  in  the  full  sense  of  the 
term,  the  force  which  underlies  all  a  child's  conceptions  of 
'  right '.  In  spite  of  the  difficulties  of  moral  training,  of 
drilling  children  into  orderly  habits — and  I  do  not  lose 
sight  of  these — it  may  confidently  be  said  that  they  have 
an  inbred  respect  for  what  is  customary,  and  wears  the  ap- 
pearance of  a  rule  of  life.  Nor  is  this,  I  believe,  altogether 
a  reflexion,  by  imitation,  of  others'  orderly  ways,  and  of 
the  system  of  rules  which  is  imposed  on  him  by  others. 
I  am  quite  ready  to  admit  that  the  institution  of  social  life, 
the  regular  procession  of  the  daily  doings  of  the  house,  aided 


UNDER   LAW.  28 1 

by  the  system  of  parental  discipline,  has  much  to  do  with 
fixing  the  idea  of  orderliness  and  regularity  in  the  child's 
mind.  Yet  I  believe  the  facts  point  to  something  more,  to 
an  innate  disposition  to  follow  precedent  and  rule,  which 
precedes  education,  and  is  one  of  the  forces  to  which 
education  can  appeal.  This  disposition  has  its  roots  in 
habit,  which  is  apparently  a  law  of  all  life  :  but  it  is  more 
than  the  blind  impulse  of  habit,  since  it  is  reflective  and 
rational,  and  implies  a  recognition  of  the  universal. 

The  first  crude  manifestation  of  this  disposition  to  make 
rule,  to  rationalise  life  by  subjecting  it  to  a  general  method, 
is  seen  in  those  actions  which  seem  little  more  than  the 
working  of  habit,  the  insistence  on  the  customary  lines  of 
procedure  at  meals  and  such  like.  A  mother  writes  that 
her  boy  when  five  years  old  was  quite  a  stickler  for 
punctilious  order  in  these  matters.  His  cup  and  spoon 
had  to  be  put  in  precisely  the  right  place,  the  sequences  of 
the  day,  as  the  lesson  before  the  walk,  the  walk  before  bed, 
had  to  be  rigorously  observed.  Any  breach  of  the  custom- 
ary was  apt  to  be  resented  as  a  sort  of  impiety.  This  may 
be  an  extreme  instance,  but  my  observation  leads  me  to 
say  that  such  punctiliousness  is  not  uncommon.  What  is 
more,  I  have  seen  it  developing  itself  where  the  system  of 
parental  government  was  by  no  means  characterised  by 
severe  insistence  on  such  minutiae  of  order.  And  this  would 
seem  to  show  that  it  cannot  wholly  be  set  down  to  the 
influences  of  such  government.  It  seems  rather  to  be  a 
spontaneous  extension  of  the  realm  of  rule  or  law. 

This  impulse  to  extend  rule  appears  more  plainly  in 
many  of  the  little  ceremonial  observances  of  the  child. 
Very  charmingly  is  this  respect  for  rule  exhibited  in  rela- 
tion to  his  animals,  dolls  and  other  pets.  Not  only  are 
they  required  to  do  things  in  a  proper  orderly  manner, 
but  people  have  to  treat  them  with  due  deference. 

"  Every  night,"  writes  a  mother  of  her  boy  aged  two  years 
seven  months,  "  after  I  have  kissed  and  shaken  hands  with  him,  I 


282  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

have  to  kiss  his  '  boy,'  that  is  his  doll,  who  sleeps  with  him,  and  to 
shake  its  two  hands — also  to  shake  the  four  hoofs  of  a  tiny  horse 
which  lies  at  the  foot  of  his  cot.  When  all  this  has  been  gone 
through,  he  stands  up  and  entreats,  '  More  tata,  please,  more  tata/ 
i.e.,  '  kiss  me  again  and  say  more  good-nights  '.  These  customs  of 
his  with  regard  to  kissing  are  peculiar  to  himself — he  kisses  his  'boy' 
(doll),  also  pictures  of  horses,  dogs,  cocks  and  hens,  and  he  puts 
his  head  against  us  to  be  kissed ;  but  he  will  only  shake  hands  and 
will  not  kiss  people  himself:  he  reserves  his  kisses  for  what  he 
seems  to  feel  inferior  things.  We  kiss  our  boy,  he  kisses  his  ;  but 
he  insists  upon  being  shaken  hands  with  for  his  part.  If  other 
children  come  to  play  he  gives  them  toys,  watches  them  with  de- 
light, tries  to  give  them  rides  on  his  '  go-go's,'  but  does  not  kiss 
them  ;  though  he  will  stroke  their  hair  he  does  not  return  their 
kisses.  It  seems  to  me  that  he  regards  it  as  an  action  to  be 
reserved  for  an  inferior  thing." 

I  have  quoted  at  length  this  careful  bit  of  maternal 
observation  because  it  seems  to  indicate  so  clearly  a 
spontaneous  extension  of  a  custom.  The  practice  of  the 
mother  and  father  in  kissing  him  was  generalised  into  a 
rule  of  ceremony  in  the  treatment  of  all  inferiors. 

This  subject  of  childish  ceremonial  is  a  curious  one,  and 
deserves  a  more  careful  study.  It  is  hardly  less  interesting 
than  the  origin  and  survival  of  adult  ceremonial,  as  eluci- 
dated by  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer.  The  respect  for  orderly- 
procedure  on  all  serious  occasions,  and  especially  at  church, 
is  as  exacting  as  that  of  any  savage  tribe.  Punch  illustrated 
this  some  years  ago  by  a  picture  of  a  little  girl  asking  her 
mamma  if  Mr.  So-and-So  was  not  a  very  wicked  man, 
because  he  didn't  "  smell  his  hat "  when  he  came  into  his 
pew. 

This  jealous  regard  for  ceremony  and  the  proprieties  of 
behaviour  is  seen  in  the  enforcement  of  rules  of  politeness 
by  children  who  will  extend  them  far  beyond  the  scope 
intended  by  the  parent.  A  delightful  instance  of  this  fell 
under  my  own  observation,  as  I  was  walking  on  Hamp- 
stead  Heath.  It  was  a  spring  day,  and  the  fat  buds  of 
the  chestnuts  were  bursting  into  magnificent  green  plumes. 


UNDER   LAW.  283 

Two  well-dressed  '  misses,'  aged,  I  should  say,  about  nine 
and  eleven,  were  taking  their  correct  morning  walk.  The 
elder  called  the  attention  of  the  younger  to  one  of  the  trees, 
pointing  to  it.  The  younger  exclaimed  in  a  highly  shocked 
tone  :  "  Oh,  Maud  (or  was  it  '  Mabel  '  ?),  you  know  you 
sliouldrit  point !  "  The  notion  of  perpetrating  a  rudeness 
on  the  chestnut  tree  was  funny  enough.  But  the  incident 
is  instructive  as  illustrating  the  childish  tendency  to  stretch 
and  generalise  rules  to  the  utmost. 

The  domain  of  prayer  well  illustrates  the  same  tendency. 
The  child  envisages  God  as  a  very,  very  grand  person,  and 
naturally,  therefore,  extends  to  him  all  the  courtesies  he 
knows  of.  Thus  he  must  be  addressed  politely  with  the 
due  forms  '  Please,'  '  If  you  please,'  and  so  forth.  The 
German  child  shrinks  from  using  the  familiar  form  '  Du  ' 
in  his  prayers.  As  one  maiden  of  seven  well  put  it  in  reply 
to  a  question  why  she  used  '  Sie'  in  her  prayers  :  "  Ich 
werde  doch  den  lieben  Gott  nicht  Du  nennen  :  ich  kenne 
ihn  ja  gar  nicht ".  Again,  a  child  feels  that  he  must  not 
worry  or  bore  God  (children  generally  find  out  that  some 
people  look  on  them  as  bores),  or  treat  him  with  any  kind 
of  disrespect.  C.  objected  to  his  sister's  remaining  so  long 
at  her  prayers,  apparently  on  the  ground  that,  as  God  knew 
what  she  had  to  say,  her  much  talking  would  be  likely  to 
bore  him.  An  American  boy  of  four  on  one  occasion 
refused  to  say  his  prayers,  explaining,  "  Why,  they're  old. 
God  has  heard  them  so  many  times  that  they  are  old  to 
him  too.  Why,  he  knows  them  as  well  as  I  do  myself." 
On  the  other  hand,  God  must  not  be  kept  waiting.  "  Oh, 
mamma,"  said  a  little  boy  of  three  years  eight  months  (the 
same  that  was  so  insistent  about  the  kissing  and  hand- 
shaking), "how  long  you  have  kept  me  awake  for  you;  God 
has  been  wondering  so  whenever  I  was  going  to  say  my 
prayers."  All  the  words  must  be  nicely  said  to  him.  A 
little  boy,  aged  four  and  three-quarter  years,  once  stopped 
in  the  middle  of  a  prayer  and  asked  his  mother:  "  Oh  !  how 


284  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

do  you  spell  that  word  ? "  The  question  is  curious  as 
suggesting  that  the  child  may  have  envisaged  his  silent 
communications  to  the  far-off  King  as  a  letter.  In  any 
case,  it  showed  painstaking  and  the  wish  not  to  offend  by 
slovenliness  of  address. 

Not  only  do  children  thus  of  themselves  extend  the 
scope  and  empire  of  rule,  they  show  a  disposition  to  make 
rules  for  themselves.  If  a  child  that  is  told  to  do  a 
thing  on  a  single  occasion  only  is  found  repeating  the 
action  on  other  occasions,  this  seems  to  show  the  germ  of  a 
law-making  impulse.  A  little  boy  of  two  years  one  month 
was  once  told  to  give  a  lot  of  old  toys  to  the  children  of 
the  gardener.  Some  time  after,  on  receiving  some  new 
toys,  he  put  away  his  old  ones  as  before  for  the  less 
fortunate  children.  Every  careful  observer  of  children 
knows  that  they  are  apt  to  proceed  this  way,  to  erect 
particular  actions  and  suggestions  into  precedents.  This 
tendency  gives  something  of  the  amusing  priggishness  to 
the  ways  of  childhood. 

There  is  little  doubt,  I  think,  that  this  respect  for 
proper  orderly  behaviour,  for  precedent  and  general  rule, 
forms  a  vital  element  in  the  child's  submission  to  parental 
law.  In  fixing  our  attention  on  occasional  acts  of  disobedi- 
ence and  lawlessness  we  are  apt  to  overlook  the  ease,  the 
absence  of  friction  with  which  normal  children,  if  only 
decently  trained,  fall  in  with  the  larger  part  of  our  obser- 
vances and  ordinances. 

That  the  instinct  for  order  does  assist  moral  discipline 
may  be  seen  in  the  fact  that  children  are  apt  to  pay  enor- 
mous deference  to  our  rules.  Nothing  is  more  suggestive 
here  than  the  talk  of  children  among  themselves,  the  em- 
phasis they  are  wont  to  lay  on  the  '  must '  and  '  must  not '. 
The  truth  is  that  children  have  a  tremendous  belief  in  law : 
a  rule  is  apt  to  present  itself  to  their  imagination  as  a 
thing  supremely  sacred  and  awful  before  which  it  pros- 
trates itself. 


UNDER   LAW.  285 

This  recognition  of  the  absolute  imperativeness  of  a 
rule  properly  laid  down  by  the  recognised  authority  is  seen 
in  children's  jealous  insistence  on  the  observance  of  the  rule 
in  their  own  case  and  in  that  of  others.  As  has  been 
observed  by  Preyer  a  child  of  two  years  eight  months  will 
follow  out  the  prohibitions  of  the  mother  when  he  falls  into 
other  hands,  sternly  protesting,  for  example,  against  the 
nurse  giving  him  the  forbidden  knife  at  table.  Very 
proper  children  rather  like  to  instruct  their  aunts  and  other 
ignorant  persons  as  to  the  right  way  of  dealing  with  them, 
and  will  rejoice  in  the  opportunity  of  setting  them  right 
even  when  it  means  a  deprivation  for  themselves.  The 
self-denying  ordinance  :  '  Mamma  doesn't  let  me  have  many 
sweets,'  is  by  no  means  beyond  the  powers  of  such  a  child. 
One  can  see  here,  no  doubt,  traces  of  a  childish  sense  of  self- 
importance,  a  feeling  of  the  much-waited-on  little  sovereign 
for  what  befits  his  supreme  worth.  Yet,  allowing  for  such 
elements,  there  seems  to  me  to  be  in  this  behaviour  a  resi- 
due of  genuine  respect  for  parental  law. 

These  carryings  out  of  the  parental  behest  when  en- 
trusted to  other  hands  are  instructive  as  suggesting  that  the 
child  feels  the  constraining  force  of  the  command  when  its 
author  is  no  longer  present  to  enforce  it.  Perhaps  a 
clearer  evidence  of  respect  for  the  law  as  such,  apart  from 
its  particular  enforcement  by  the  parent,  is  supplied  by 
children's  way  of  extending  the  rules  laid  down  for  their 
own  behaviour  to  that  of  others.  This  point  has  already 
been  illustrated  in  the  tendency  to  universalise  the 
observances  of  courtesy  and  the  like.  No  trait  is  better 
marked  in  the  normal  child  than  the  impulse  to  subject 
others  to  his  own  disciplinary  system.  In  truth,  children 
are  for  the  most  part  particularly  alert  disciplinarians. 
With  what  amusing  severity  are  they  wont  to  lay  down  the 
law  to  their  dolls,  and  their  animal  playmates,  subjecting 
them  to  precisely  the  same  prohibitions  and  punishments  as 
those  to  which  they  themselves  are  subject !  Nor  do  they 


286  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

stop  here.  They  enforce  the  duties  just  as  courageously*  on 
their  human  elders.  A  mite  of  eighteen  months  went  up 
to  her  elder  sister,  who  was  crying,  and  with  perfect  mimicry 
of  the  nurse's  corrective  manner,  said  :  "  Hush  !  Hush  ! 
papa ! "  pointing  at  the  same  time  to  the  door.  The 
little  girl  M.  when  twenty-two  months  old  was  disappointed 
because  a  certain  Mr.  G.  did  not  call.  In  the  evening  she 
said  :  "  Mr.  D.  not  did  turn — was  very  naughty,  Mr.  D.  have 
to  be  whipped  ".  So  natural  and  inevitable  to  the  intelli- 
gence of  a  child  does  it  seem  that  the  system  of  restraints, 
rebukes,  punishments  under  which  he  lives  should  have 
universal  validity. 

This  judicial  bent  of  the  child  is  a  curious  one  and  often 
develops  a  priggish  fondness  for  setting  others  morally 
straight.  Small  boys  have  to  endure  much  in  this  way 
from  the  hands  of  slightly  older  sisters  proficient  in 
matters  of  law  and  delighting  to  enforce  the  moralities.  But 
sometimes  the  sisters  lapse  into  naughtiness,  and  then  the 
small  boys  have  their  chance.  They  too  can  on  such 
occasions  be  priggish  if  not  downright  hypocritical.  A  little 
boy  had  been  quarrelling  with  his  sister  named  Muriel  just 
before  going  to  bed.  When  he  was  undressed  he  knelt 
down  to  say  his  prayers,  Muriel  sitting  near  and  listening. 
He  prayed  (audibly)  in  this  wise  :  "  Please,  God,  make 
Muriel  a  good  girl,"  then  looked  up  and  said  in  an  angry 
voice,  "  Do  you  hear  that,  Muriel?"  and  after  this  digression 
resumed  his  petition.  I  believe  fathers  when  reading  family 
prayers  have  been  known  to  apply  portions  of  Scripture  in 
this  personal  manner  to  particular  members  of  the  family  ; 
and  it  is  even  possible  that  extempore  prayers  have  been 
invented,  as  by  this  little  prig  of  a  boy,  for  the  purpose  of 
administering  a  sort  of  back-handed  corrective  blow  to  an 
erring  neighbour. 

This  mania  for  correction  shows  itself  too  in  relation 
to  the  authorities  themselves.  A  collection  of  rebukes  and 
expositions  of  moral  precept  supplied  by  children  to  their 


UNDER   LAW.  287 

erring  parents  would  be  amusing  and  suggestive.  As  was 
illustrated  above,  a  child  is  especially  keen  to  spy  faults 
in  his  governors  when  they  are  themselves  administering 
authority.  Here  is  another  example  :  A  boy  of  two — 
the  moral  instruction  of  parents  by  the  child  begins  betimes 
— would  not  go  to  sleep  when  bidden  to  do  so  by  his  father 
and  mother.  At  length  the  father,  losing  patience,  ad- 
dressed him  with  a  man's  fierce  emphasis.  This  mode  of 
admonition  so  far  from  cowering  the  child  simply  offended 
his  sense  of  propriety,  for  he  rejoined  :  "  You  s'ouldn't 
s'ouldn't,  Assum  (i.e.,  '  Arthur,'  the  father's  name),  you 
s'ould  speak  nicely  ". 

The  lengths  to  which  a  child  with  the  impulse  of  moral 
correction  strong  in  him  will  sometimes  go,  are  quite 
appalling.  One  evening  a  little  girl  of  six  had  been  re- 
peating the  Lord's  prayer.  When  she  had  finished,  she 
looked  up  and  said  :  '  I  don't  like  that  prayer,  you  ought 
not  to  ask  for  bread,  and  all  that  greediness,  you  ought 
only  to  ask  for  goodness  ! '  There  is  probably  in  this  an 
imitative  reproduction  of  something  which  the  child  had 
been  told  by  her  mother,  or  had  overheard.  Yet  allowing 
for  this,  one  cannot  but  recognise  a  quite  alarming  degree 
of  precocious  moral  priggishness. 

We  may  now  turn  to  what  my  readers  will  probably 
regard  as  still  clearer  evidence  of  a  law-fearing  instinct  in 
children,  viz.,  their  voluntary  submission  to  its  commands. 
We  are  apt  to  think  of  these  little  ones  as  doing  right  only 
under  external  compulsion.  But  although  a  child  of  four 
may  be  far  from  attaining  to  the  state  of  'autonomy  of 
will  '  or  self-legislation  spoken  of  by  the  philosopher,  he 
may  show  a  germ  of  such  free  adoption  of  law.  It  is  pos- 
sible that  we  see  the  first  faint  traces  of  this  in  a  small  child's 
way  of  giving  orders  to,  rebuking,  and  praising  himself. 
The  little  girl  M.,  when  only  twenty  months  old,  would, 
when  left  by  her  mother  alone  in  a  room,  say  to  herself : 
4  Tay  dar  '  (stay  there).  About  the  same  time,  after  being 


288  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

naughty  and  squealing  '  like  a  railway-whistle,'  she  would 
after  each  squeal  say  in  a  deep  voice,  '  Be  dood,  Babba  r 
(her  name).  At  the  age  of  twenty-two  months  she  had 
been  in  the  garden  and  misbehaving  by  treading  on  the 
box  border,  so  that  she  had  to  be  carried  away  by  her 
mother.  After  confessing  her  fault  she  wanted  to  go  into 
the  garden  again,  and  promised,  '  Babba  will  not  be 
naughty  adain '.  When  she  was  out  she  looked  at  the 
box,  saying,  "  If  oo  (you)  do  dat  I  shall  have  to  take  oo 
in,  Babba".  Here,  no  doubt,  we  see  quaint  mimicries 
of  the  external  control,  but  they  seem  to  me  to  indicate 
a  movement  in  the  direction  of  self-control. 

Very  instructive  here  is  the  way  in  which  children  will 
voluntarily  come  and  submit  themselves  to  our  discipline. 
The  little  girl  M.  when  less  than  two  years  old,  would  go 
to  her  mother  and  confess  some  piece  of  naughtiness  and 
suggest  the  punishment.  A  little  boy  aged  two  years  and 
four  months  was  deprived  of  a  pencil  from  Thursday  to 
Sunday  for  scribbling  on  the  wall-paper.  His  punishment 
was,  however,  tempered  by  permission  to  draw  when  taken 
downstairs.  On  Saturday  he  had  finished  a  picture  down- 
stairs which  pleased  him.  When  his  nurse  fetched  him 
she  wanted  to  look  at  the  drawing,  but  the  boy  strongly- 
objected,  saying :  "  No  Nana  (name  for  nurse)  look  at  it 
till  Sunday  ".  And  sure  enough  when  Sunday  came,  and 
the  pencil  was  restored  to  him,  he  promptly  showed  nurse 
his  picture.  This  is  an  excellent  observation  full  of  sugges- 
tion as  to  the  way  in  which  a  child's  mind  works.  Among 
other  things  it  seems  to  show  pretty  plainly  that  the  little 
fellow  looked  on  the  nursery  and  all  its  belongings,  includ- 
ing the  nurse,  during  those  three  days  as  a  place  of  disgrace 
into  which  the  privileges  of  the  artist  were  not  to  enter. 
He  was  allowed  the  indulgence  of  drawing  downstairs, 
but  he  had  no  right  to  exhibit  his  workmanship  to  the 
nurse,  who  was  inseparably  associated  in  his  mind  with 
the  forbidden  nursery  drawing.  Thus  a  process  of  genuine 


UNDER   LAW.  289 

child-thought    led    to    a   self-instituted    extension   of    the 
punishment. 

A  month  later  this  child  "  pulled  down  a  picture  in  the 
nursery" — the  nursery  walls  seem  to  have  had  a  fell  attrac- 
tion for  him — "  by  standing  on  a  sofa  and  tugging  till  the 
wire  broke.  He  was  alone  at  the  time  and  very  much 
frightened  though  not  hurt.  He  was  soothed  and  told  to 
leave  the  picture  alone  in  future,  but  was  not  in  any  way 
rebuked.  He  seemed,  however,  to  think  that  some  punish- 
ment was  necessary,  for  he  presently  asked  whether  he  was 
going  to  have  a  certain  favourite  frock  on  that  afternoon. 
He  was  told  '  No  '  (the  reason  being  that  the  day  was  wet 
or  something  similar)  and  he  said  immediately :  '  'Cause 
Xeil  pulled  picture  down  ? ' '  Here  I  think  we  have  un- 
mistakable evidence  of  an  expectation  of  punishment  as 
the  fit  and  proper  sequel  in  a  case  which,  though  it  did 
not  exactly  resemble  those  already  branded  by  it,  was  felt 
in  a  vague  way  to  be  disorderly  and  naughty. 

Such  stories  of  expectation  of  punishment  are  capped 
by  instances  of  correction  actually  inflicted  by  the  child 
on  himself.  I  believe  it  is  not  uncommon  for  a  child  when 
possessed  by  a  sense  of  having  been  naughty  to  object  to 
having  nice  things  at  table  on  the  ground  that  previously 
on  a  like  occasion  he  was  deprived  of  them.  But  the 
most  curious  instance  of  this  moral  rigour  towards  self 
which  I  have  met  with  is  the  following  :  A  girl  of  nine  had 
been  naughty,  and  was  very  sorry  for  her  misbehaviour. 
Shortly  after  she  came  to  her  lesson  limping,  and  remarked 
that  she  felt  very  uncomfortable.  Being  asked  by  her 
governess  what  was  the  matter  with  her  she  said  :  "  It  was 
very  naughty  of  me  to  disobey  you,  so  I  put  my  right  shoe 
on  to  my  left  foot  and  my  left  shoe  on  to  my  right  foot ". 

The  facts  here  briefly  illustrated  seem  to  me  to  show- 
that  there  is  in  the  child  from  the  first  a  rudiment  of  true 
law-abidingness.  And  this  is  a  force  of  the  greatest  con- 
sequence to  the  disciplinarian.  It  is  something  which  takes 

19 


290  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

side  in  the  child's  breast  with  the  reasonable  governor  and 
the  laws  which  he  or  she  administers.  It  secures  ready 
compliance  with  a  large  part  of  the  discipline  enforced. 
When  the  impulse  urging  towards  licence  has  been  too 
strong,  and  disobedience  ensues,  this  same  instinct  comes 
to  the  aid  of  order  and  good  conduct  by  inflicting  pains 
which  are  the  beginning  of  what  we  call  remorse. 

By-and-by  other  forces  will  assist.  The  affectionate 
child  will  reflect  on  the  misery  his  disobedience  causes  his 
mother.  A  boy  of  four  and  three-quarter  years  must,  one 
supposes,  have  woke  up  to  this  fact  when  he  remarked  to 
his  mother  :  "  Did  you  choose  to  be  a  mother  ?  I  think  it 
must  be  rather  tiresome."  The  day  when  the  child  first 
becomes  capable  of  thus  putting  himself  into  his  mother's 
place  and  realising,  if  only  for  an  instant,  the  trouble  he 
has  brought  on  her,  is  an  all-important  one  in  his  moral 
development. 

The   Wise  Law-giver. 

As  our  illustrations  have  suggested,  and  as  every 
thoughtful  parent  knows  well  enough,  the  problem  of 
moral  training  in  the  first  years  is  full  of  difficulty.  Yet 
our  study  surely  suggests  that  it  is  not  so  hopeless  a 
problem  as  we  are  sometimes  weakly  disposed  to  think. 
Perhaps  a  word  or  two  on  this  may  not  inappropriately 
close  this  essay. 

I  will  readily  concede  that  the  difficulty  of  inculcating 
in  children  a  sweet  and  cheerful  obedience  arises  partly 
from  their  nature.  There  are  trying  children,  just  as  there 
are  trying  dogs  that  howl  and  make  themselves  disagreeable 
for  no  discoverable  reason  but  their  inherent  '  cussedness '. 
There  are,  I  doubt  not,  conscientious  painstaking  mothers 
who  have  been  baffled  by  having  to  manage  what  appears 
to  be  the  utterly  unmanageable. 

Yet  I  think  that  we  ought  to  be  very  slow  to  pronounce 
any  child  unmanageable.  I  know  full  well  that  in  the  case 


UNDER   LAW.  29 1 

of  these  small  growing  things  there  are  all  kinds  of  hidden 
physical  commotions  which  breed  caprices,  ruffle  the  temper, 
and  make  them  the  opposite  of  docile.  The  peevish  child 
who  will  do  nothing,  will  listen  to  no  suggestion,  is  assuredly 
a  difficult  subject  to  deal  with.  But  such  moodiness  and 
cross-grainedness  springing  from  bodily  disturbances  will 
be  allowed  for  by  the  discerning  mother,  who  will  be  too 
•wise  to  bring  the  severer  measures  of  discipline  to  bear  on 
a  child  when  subject  to  their  malign  influence.  Waiving 
these  disturbing  factors,  however,  I  should  say  that  a  good 
part,  certainly  more  than  one  half,  of  the  difficulty  of  train- 
ing children  is  due  to  our  clumsy  bungling  modes  of  going 
to  work. 

Sensible  persons  know  that  there  is  a  good  and  a  bad 
way  of  approaching  a  child.  The  wrong  ways  of  trying  to 
constrain  children  are,  alas,  numerous.  I  am  not  writing 
an  '  advice  to  parents,'  and  am  not  called  on  therefore  to 
deal  with  the  much-disputed  question  of  the  Tightness  and 
wrongness  of  corporal  punishment.  Slaps  may  be  needful 
in  the  early  stages,  even  though  they  do  lead  to  little  tussles. 
A  mother  assures  me  that  these  battles  with  her  several 
children  have  all  fallen  between  the  ages  of  sixteen  months 
and  two  years.  It  is,  however,  conceivable  that  such  fights 
might  be  avoided  altogether  ;  yet  a  man  should  be  chary 
of  dogmatising  on  this  delicate  matter. 

What  is  beyond  doubt  is  that  the  slovenly  discipline  — 
if  indeed  discipline  it  is  to  be  called — which  consists  in 
alternations  of  gushing  fondness  with  almost  savage  severity, 
or  fits  of  government  and  restraint  interpolated  between 
long  periods  of  neglect  and  laisser  faire,  is  precisely  what 
develops  the  rebellious  and  law-resisting  propensities.  But 
discipline  can  be  bad  without  being  a  stupid  pretence. 
Everything  in  the  shape  of  inconsistency,  saying  one  thing 
at  one  time,  another  thing  at  another,  or  treating  one  child 
in  one  fashion,  another  in  another,  tends  to  undermine  the 
pillars  of  authority.  Young  eyes  are  quick  to  note  these 


292  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

little  contradictions,  and  they  sorely  resent  them.  It  is 
astonishing  how  careless  disciplinarians  can  show  them- 
selves before  these  astute  little  critics.  It  is  the  commonest 
thing  to  tell  a  child  to  behave  like  his  elders,  forgetting  that 
this,  if  indeed  a  rule  at  all,  can  only  be  one  of  very  limited 
application.  Here  is  a  suggestive  example  of  the  effect  of 
this  sort  of  teaching  sent  me  by  a  mother.  "  At  three  and 
a  half,  when  some  visitors  were  present,  she  was  told  not 
to  talk  at  dinner-time.  '  Why  me  no  talk  ?  Papa  talks/ 
'  Yes,  but  papa  is  grown  up,  and  you  are  only  a  little  girl  ; 
you  can't  do  just  like  grown-up  people.'  She  was  silent  for 
some  time,  but  when  I  told  her  ten  minutes  later  to  sit 
nicely  with  her  hands  in  her  lap  like  her  cousins,  she 
replied,  with  a  very  humorous  smile,  '  Me  tan't  (can't)  sit 
like  grown-up  people,  me  is  only  a  little  girl  V 

We  can  fail  and  make  children  disloyal  instead  of  loyal 
subjects  by  unduly  magnifying  our  office,  by  insisting  too« 
much  on  our  authority.  Children  who  are  over-ruled,  who 
have  no  taste  of  being  left  unmolested  and  free  to  do  what 
they  like,  can  hardly  be  expected  to  submit  graciously. 
Another  way  of  carrying  parental  control  to  excess  is  by 
exacting  displays  of  virtue  which  are  beyond  the  moral 
capabilities  of  the  child.  A  lady  sends  me  this  reminiscence 
of  her  childhood.  She  had  been  promised  sixpence  when 
she  could  play  her  scales  without  fault,  and  succeeded  in 
the  exploit  on  her  sixth  birthday.  The  sixpence  was  given 
to  her,  but  soon  after  her  mother  suggested  that  she  should 
spend  the  money  in  fruit  to  give  to  her  (the  mother's)  invalid 
friend.  This  was  offending  the  sense  of  justice,  for  if  the 
child  is  jealous  of  anything  as  his  very  own  it  is  surely  the 
reward  he  has  earned  ;  and  was,  moreover,  a  foolish  attempt 
to  call  forth  generosity  where  generosity  was  wholly  out  of 
place.  An  even  worse  example  is  that  recorded  by  Ruskin. 
When  a  child  he  was  expected  to  come  down  to  dessert  and 
crack  nuts  for  the  grand  older  folk  while  peremptorily  for- 
bidden to  eat  any.  Such  refined  cruelties  of  government 


UNDER   LAW.  293 

•deserve  to  be  defeated  in  their  objects.  Much  of  our  ill 
success  in  governing  children  would  probably  turn  out  to  be 
attributable  to  unwisdom  in  assigning  tasks,  and  more  par- 
ticularly in  making  exactions  which  wound  that  sensitive 
fibre  of  a  child's  heart,  the  sense  of  justice. 

Parents  are,  I  fear,  apt  to  forget  that  generosity  and  the 
other  liberal  virtues  owe  their  worth  to  their  spontaneity. 
They  may  be  suggested  and  encouraged  but  cannot  be 
exacted.  On  the  other  hand,  a  parent  cannot  be  more 
foolish  than  to  discourage  a  spontaneous  outgoing  of  good 
impulse,  as  if  nothing  were  good  but  what  emanated  from 
a  spirit  of  obedience.  In  a  pretty  and  touching  little  Ameri- 
can work,  Beckonings  from  Little  Hands,  the  writer  describes 
the  remorse  of  a  father  who,  after  his  child's  death,  recalled 
the  little  fellow's  first  crude  endeavour  to  help  him  by 
bringing  fuel,  an  endeavour  which,  alas !  he  had  met  with 
something  like  a  rebuff. 

The  right  method  of  training,  which  develops  and 
strengthens  by  bracing  exercise  the  instinct  of  obedience, 
cannot  easily  be  summarised  ;  for  it  is  the  outcome  of  the 
highest  wisdom.  I  may,  however,  be  permitted  to  indicate 
one  or  two  of  its  main  features. 

Informed  at  the  outset  by  a  fine  moral  feeling  and  a 
practical  tact  as  to  what  ought  to  be  expected,  the  wise 
mother  is  concerned  before  everything  to  make  her  laws 
appear  as  much  a  matter  of  course  as  the  daily  sequences 
•of  the  home  life,  as  unquestionable  axioms  of  behaviour  ; 
and  this  not  by  a  foolish  vehemence  of  inculcation  but  by  a 
quiet  skilful  inweaving  of  them  into  the  order  of  the  child's 
world.  To  expect  the  right  thing,  as  though  the  wrong 
thing  were  an  impossibility,  rather  than  to  be  always  pointing 
out  the  wrong  thing  and  threatening  consequences ;  to 
make  all  her  words  and  all  her  own  actions  support  this 
view  of  the  inevitableness  of  law ;  to  meet  any  indications  of  a 
disobedient  spirit,  first  with  misunderstanding,  and  later  with 
amazement ;  this  is  surely  the  first  and  fundamental  matter. 


294  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

The  effectiveness  of  this  discipline  depends  on  the 
simple  psychological  principle  that  difficult  actions  tend  to 
realise  themselves  in  the  measure  in  which  the  ideas  of  them 
become  clear  and  persistent.  Get  a  child  steadily  to  follow 
out  in  thought  an  act  to  which  he  is  disinclined  and  you 
have  more  than  half  mastered  the  disinclination.  The 
quiet  daily  insistence  of  the  wise  rule  of  the  nursery  pro- 
ceeds by  setting  up  and  maintaining  the  ideas  of  dutiful 
actions,  and  so  excluding  the  thought  of  disobedient 
actions. 

It  has  recently  been  pointed  out  that  in  this  moral  control 
of  the  child  through  suggestion  of  right  actions  we  have 
something  closely  analogous  to  the  action  of  suggestion 
upon  the  hypnotised  subject.  The  mother,  the  right  sort  of 
mother,  has  on  the  child's  mind  something  of  the  subduing 
influence  of  the  Nancy  doctor :  she  induces  ideas  of 
particular  actions,  gives  them  force  and  persistence  so  that 
the  young  mind  is  possessed  by  them  and  they  work  them- 
selves out  into  fulfilment  as  occasion  arises. 

In  order  that  this  effect  of  '  obsession,'  or  a  full  occupa- 
tion of  consciousness  with  the  right  idea,  may  result,  certain 
precautions  are  necessary.  As  observant  parents  know,  a. 
child  may  be  led  by  a  prohibition  to  do  the  very  thing  he  is 
bidden  not  to  do.  We  have  seen  how  readily  a  child's  mind 
moves  from  an  affirmation  to  a  corresponding  negation,  and 
conversely.  The  '  contradictoriness '  of  a  child,  his  passion 
for  saying  the  opposite  of  what  you  say,  shows  the  same  odd 
manner  of  working  of  the  young  mind.  Wanting  to  do 
what  he  is  told  not  to  do  is  another  effect  of  this  "  contrary- 
suggestion,"  as  it  has  been  called,  aided  of  course  by  the 
child's  dislike  of  all  constraint.1  If  we  want  to  avoid  this 
effect  of  suggestion  and  to  secure  the  direct  effect,  we  must 
first  of  all  acquire  the  difficult  secret  of  personal  influence,  of 
the  masterfulness  which  does  not  repel  but  attracts  ;  and 

1  On  the  nature  of  this  contrary  suggestion   see   Mark  Baldwin,. 
Mental  Development  in  the  Child  and  the  Race.  p.  145  f. 


UNDER   LAW.  295 

secondly  try  to  reduce  our  forbiddings  with  their  contrary- 
suggestions  to  a  minimum. 

The  action  in  moral  training  of  this  influence  of  a  quasi- 
hypnotic  suggestion  becomes  more  clearly  marked  when 
difficulties  occur  ;  when  some  outbreak  of  wilful  resistance 
has  to  be  recognised  and  met,  or  some  new  and  re- 
latively arduous  feat  of  obedience  has  to  be  initiated. 
Here  I  find  that  intelligent  mothers  have  found  their  way 
to  methods  closely  resembling  those  of  the  hypnotist. 
"  When  R.  is  naughty  and  in  a  passion  (writes  a  lady  friend 
of  her  child  aged  three  and  a  half),  I  need  only  suggest 
to  him  that  he  is  some  one  else,  say-  a  friend  of  his,  and  he 
will  take  it  up  at  once,  he  will  pretend  to  be  the  other 
child,  and  at  last  go  and  call  himself,  now  a  good  boy, 
back  again."  This  mode  of  suggestion,  by  helping  the 
'higher  self  to  detach  itself  from  and  control  the  lower  might, 
one  suspects,  be  much  more  widely  employed  in  the  moral 
training  of  children.  Suggestion  may  work  through  the 
emotions.  Merely  to  say,  '  Mother  would  like  you  to  do 
this,'  is  to  set  up  an  idea  in  the  child's  consciousness 
by  help  of  the  sustaining  force  of  his  affection.  "  If  (writes 
a  lady)  there  was  anything  Lyle  particularly  wished  not  to 
do,  his  mother  had  only  to  say,  '  Dobbin  (a  sort  of  can- 
onised toy-horse  already  referred  to)  would  like  you  to 
do  this,'  and  it  was  done  without  a  murmur." 

We  have  another  analogue  to  hypnotic  suggestion  where 
a  mother  prepares  her  child  some  time  beforehand  for  a 
difficult  duty,  telling  him  that  she  expects  him  to  perform 
it.  A  mother  writes  that  her  boy,  when  about  the  age  of 
two  and  a  half  years  more  particularly,  was  inclined  to 
burst  into  loud  but  short  fits  of  crying.  "  I  have  found 
(she  .says)  these  often  checked  by  telling  him  beforehand 
what  would  be  expected  of  him,  and  exacting  a  promise 
that  he  would  do  the  thing  cheerfully.  I  have  seen  his 
face  flush  up  ready  to  cry  when  he  remembered  his  promise 
and  controlled  himself."  This  reminds  one  forcibly  of 


296  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  commands  suggested  by  the  hypnotiser  to  be  carried 
into  effect  when  the  subject  wakes.  Much  more,  perhaps, 
might  be  done  in  this  direction  by  choosing  the  right 
moments  for  setting  up  the  persistent  ideas  in  the  child's 
consciousness.  I  know  a  lady  who  got  into  the  way  of 
giving  moral  exhortation  to  her  somewhat  headstrong  girl 
at  night  before  the  child  fell  asleep,  and  found  this  very 
effectual.  It  is  possible  that  we  may  be  able  to  apply  this 
idea  of  preparatory  and  premunitory  suggestion  in  new  and 
surprising  ways  to  difficult  and  refractory  children.1 

One  other  way  in  which  the  wise  mother  will  win  the 
child  over  to  duty  is  by  developing  his  consciousness  of 
freedom  and  power.  A  mother,  who  was  herself  a  well- 
known  writer  for  children,  has  recorded  in  some  notes  on  her 
children  that  when  one  of  her  little  girls  had  declined  to 
accede  to  her  wish  she  used  to  say  to  her :  '  Oh,  yes,  I  think 
when  you  have  remembered  how  pleasant  it  is  to  oblige 
others  you  will  do  it'.  'I  will  think  about  it,  mamma,' 
the  child  would  reply,  laughing,  and  then  go  and  hide  her 
head  behind  a  sofa-pillow  which  she  called  her  '  thinking 
corner '.  In  half  a  minute  she  would  come  out  and  say : 
•"Oh,  yes,  mamma,  I  have  thought  about  it  and  I  will  do  it". 
This  strikes  me  as  an  admirable  combination  of  regulative 
suggestion  with  exercise  of  the  young  will  in  moral  decision. 
It  gave  the  child  the  consciousness  of  using  her  own  will, 
and  yet  maintained  the  needed  measure  of  guidance  and 
control. 

As  the  moral  consciousness  develops  and  new  problems 
arise,  new  openings  for  such  suggestive  guidance  will  offer 
themselves.  How  valuable,  for  example,  is  the  mother's 
encouragement  of  the  weakly  child,  shrinking  from  a  difficult 
.self- repressive  action,  when  she  says  with  inspiring  voice : 

1  The  bearings  of  (hypnotic)  suggestion  on  moral  education  have 
teen  discussed  by  Guyau,  Education  and  Heredity  (Engl.  transl.),  chap, 
i.  Compare  also  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  p.  267  f.,  and  Compayre,  op.  cit.,  p. 
262. 


UNDER   LAW.  297 

'  You  can  do  it  if  you  try '.  Thus  pilot-like  she  conducts 
the  little  navigator  out  into  the  open  main  of  duty  where  he 
will  have  to  steer  himself. 

I  have  tried  to  show  that  the  moral  training  of  children 
is  not  beyond  human  powers.  It  has  its  strong  supports 
in  child-nature,  and  these,  when  there  are  wisdom  and 
method  on  the  ruler's  side,  will  secure  success.  I  have  not 
said  that  the  trainer's  task  is  easy.  So  far  from  thinking 
this,  I  hold  that  a  mother  who  bravely  faces  the  problem, 
neither  abandoning  the  wayward  will  to  its  own  devices, 
nor,  hardly  less  weakly,  handing  over  the  task  of  disciplin- 
ing it  to  a  paid  substitute,  and  who  by  well-considered 
and  steadfast  effort  succeeds  in  approaching  the  perfection 
I  have  hinted  at,  combining  the  wise  ruler  with  the  tender 
and  companionable  parent,  is  among  the  few  members  of 
our  species  who  are  entitled  to  its  reverence. 


298 


IX. 
THE  CHILD  AS  ARTIST. 

ONE  of  the  most  interesting,  perhaps  also  one  of  the  most 
instructive,  phases  of  child-life  is  the  beginnings  of  art- 
activity.  This  has  been  recognised  by  one  of  the  best-known 
workers'in  the  field  of  child-psychology,  M.  Bernard  Perez, 
who  has  treated  the  subject  in  an  interesting  monograph.1 
This  department  of  our  subject  will,  like  that  of  language, 
be  found  to  have  interesting  points  of  contact  with  the 
phenomena  of  primitive  race-culture. 

The  art-impulse  of  children  lends  itself  particularly  well 
to  observation.  No  doubt,  as  we  shall  see,  there  are  diffi- 
culties for  the  observer  here.  It  may  sometimes  be  a  fine 
point  to  determine  whether  a  childish  action  properly 
falls  under  the  head  of  genuine  art-production,  though 
I  do  not  think  that  this  is  a  serious  difficulty.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  art-impulse  where  it  exists  manifests  itself 
directly  and  for  the  most  part  in  so  characteristic  an 
objective  form  that  we  are  able  to  study  its  features  with 
special  facility. 

In  its  narrow  sense  as  a  specialised  instinct  prompting 
its  possessor  to  follow  a  definite  line  of  production,  as 
drawing  of  the  artistic  sort,  or  simple  musical  composition, 
the  art-impulse  is  a  particularly  variable  phenomenon  of 
childhood.  Some  children,  who  afterwards  take  seriously 
to  a  branch  of  art-culture,  manifest  an  innate  bent  by  a 
precocious  devotion  to  this  line  of  activity.  Many  others, 

1  L'Art  et  la  Poesie  chez  I' Enfant,  1888. 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  299 

I  have  reason  to  believe,  have  a  passing  fondness  for  a 
particular  form  of  art-activity.  On  the  other  hand,  there 
are  many  children  who  display  almost  a  complete  lack,  not 
only  of  the  productive  impulse,  but  of  the  aesthetic  sense  of 
the  artist.  So  uncertain,  so  sporadic  are  these  appearances 
of  a  rudimentary  art  among  children  that  one  might  be 
easily  led  to  think  that  art-activity  ought  not  to  be  reckoned 
among  their  common  characteristics. 

To  judge  so,  however,  would  be  to  judge  erroneously  by 
applying  grown-up  standards.  It  is  commonly  recognised 
that  art  and  play  are  closely  connected.  It  is  probable 
that  the  first  crude  art  of  the  race,  or  at  least  certain  direc- 
tions of  it,  sprang  out  of  play-like  activities,  and  however 
this  be  the  likenesses  of  the  two  are  indisputable.  I  shall 
hope  to  bring  these  out  in  the  present  study.  This  being 
so,  we  are,  I  conceive,  justified  in  speaking  of  art-impulses 
as  a  common  characteristic  of  childhood. 

Although  we  shall  find  many  interesting  points  of  analogy 
between  crude  child-art  and  primitive  race-art,  we  must  not, 
as  pointed  out  above,  expect  a  perfect  parallelism.  In  some 
directions,  as  drawing,  concerted  dancing,  the  superior  ex- 
perience, strength  and  skill  of  the  adult  will  reveal  -them- 
selves, placing  child-art  at  a  considerable  disadvantage  in  the 
comparison.  Contrariwise,  the  intervention  of  the  educator's 
hand  tends  seriously  to  modify  the  course  of  development 
of  the  child's  aesthetic  aptitudes.  His  tastes  get  acted  upon 
from  the  first  and  biassed  in  the  direction  of  adult  tastes. 

This  modifying  influence  of  education  shows  itself  more 
especially  in  one  particular.  There  is  reason  to  think  that 
in  the  development  of  the  race  the  growth  of  a  feeling 
for  what  is  beautiful  was  a  concomitant  of  the  growth  of 
the  art-impulse,  the  impulse  to  adorn  the  person,  to  collect 
feathers  and  other  pretty  things.  Not  so  in  the  case  of  the 
child.  Here  we  note  a  certain  growth  of  the  liking  for  pretty 
things  before  the  spontaneous  art-impulse  has  had  time  to 
manifest  itself.  Most  children  who  have  a  cultivated  mother 


300  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

or  other  guardian  acquire  a  rudimentary  appreciation  of  what 
their  elders  think  beautiful  before  they  do  much  in  the  way 
of  art-production.  We  provide  them  with  toys,  pictures, 
we  sing  to  them  and  perhaps  we  even  take  them  to  the 
theatre,  and  so  do  our  best  to  inoculate  them  with  our  ideas 
as  to  what  is  pretty.  Hence  the  difficulty — probably  the 
chief  difficulty — of  finding  out  what  the  child-mind,  left  to 
itself,  does  prefer.  At  the  same  time  the  early  date  at  which 
such  aesthetic  preferences  begin  to  manifest  themselves  makes 
it  desirable  to  study  them  before  we  go  on  to  consider  the 
active  side  of  child-art.  We  will  try  as  well  as  we  can  to 
extricate  the  first  manifestations  of  genuine  childish  taste. 

First  Responses  to  Natural  Beauty. 

At  the  very  beginning,  before  the  educational  influence 
has  had  time  to  work,  we  can  catch  some  of  the  characteris- 
tics of  this  childish  quasi-sesthetic  feeling.  The  directions 
of  a  child's  observation,  and  of  the  movements  of  his 
grasping  arms,  tell  us  pretty  clearly  what  sort  of  things 
attract  and  please  him. 

In  the  home  scene  it  is  bright  objects,  such  as  the  fire- 
flame,  the  lamp,  the  play  of  the  sunlight  on  a  bit  of  glass 
or  a  gilded  frame;  out-of-doors,  glistening  water,  a  meadow 
whitened  by  daisies,  the  fresh  snow  mantle,  later  the  moon 
and  the  stars,  which  seem  to  impart  to  the  dawning  con- 
sciousness the  first  hint  of  the  world's  beauty.  Luminosity, 
brightness  in  its  higher  intensities,  whether  the  bright  rays 
reach  the  eye  directly  or  are  reflected  from  a  lustrous  sur- 
face, this  makes  the  first  gladness  of  the  eye  as  it  remains 
a  chief  source  of  the  gladness  of  life. 

The  feeling  for  colour  as  such  comes  distinctly  later. 
The  first  delight  in  coloured  objects  is  hardly  distinguishable 
from  the  primordial  delight  in  brightness.  This  applies  pretty 
manifestly  to  the  brightly  illumined,  rose-red  curtain  which 
Preyer's  boy  greeted  with  signs  of  satisfaction  at  the  age  of 
twenty-three  days,  and  it  applies  to  later  manifestations. 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  301 

Thus  Preyer  found  on  experimenting  with  his  boy  towards 
the  end  of  the  second  year  as  to  his  colour-discrimination 
that  a  decided  preference  was  shown  for  the  bright  or 
luminous  colours,  red  and  yellow.1  Much  the  same  thing 
was  observed  by  Miss  Shinn  in  her  interesting  account  of 
the  early  development  of  her  niece's  colour-sense.2  Thus  in 
the  twenty-eighth  month  she  showed  a  special  fondness  for 
the  daffodils,  the  bright  tints  of  which  allured  another  and 
older  maiden,  and,  alas !  to  the  place  whence  all  brightness 
was  banished.  About  the  same  time  the  child  conceived  a 
fondness  for  a  yellow  gown  of  her  aunt,  strongly  objecting 
to  the  substitution  for  it  of  a  brown  dress.  Among  the 
other  coloured  objects  which  captivated  the  eye  of  this  little 
girl  were  a  patch  of  white  cherry  blossom,  and  a  red  sun-set 
sky.  Such  observations  might  easily  be  multiplied.  White- 
ness, it  is  to  be  noted,  comes,  as  we  might  expect,  with 
bright  partial  colours,  among  the  first  favourites.3 

At  what  age  a  child  begins  to  appreciate  the  value  of 
colour  as  colour,  to  like  blue  or  red,  for  its  own  sake  and 
apart  from  its  brightness,  it  is  hard  to  say.  The  experiments 
of  Preyer,  Binet,  Baldwin,  and  others,  as  to  the  discrimina- 
tion of  colour,  are  hardly  conclusive  as  to  special  likings, 
though  Baldwin's  plan  of  getting  the  child  to  reach  out  for 
colours  throws  a  certain  light  on  this  point.  According  to 
Baldwin  blue  is  one  of  the  first  colours  to  be  singled  out  ; 
but  he  does  not  tell  us  how  the  colours  he  used  (which  did 
not,  unfortunately,  include  yellow — the  child's  favourite 
according  to  other  observers)  were  related  in  point  of 
luminosity.4 

No  doubt  a  child  of  three  or  four  is  apt  to  conceive  a 

f 

i  Op.  cit.,  p.  7  and  p.  1 1  f. 

*  Notes  on  the  Development  of  a  Child,  p.  91  ff. 

3  Cf.  Perez,  L 'Art  et  la  Poesie  chez  I' Enfant,  p.  41  ff. 

4  See  Baldwin's  two  articles  on  '  A  New  Method  of  Child-study  '  in 
Science,  April,  1893,  and  his  volume,  Mental  Development  in  the  Chili/ 
and  the  Race. 


302  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

special  liking  for  a  particular  colour,  which  favourite  he 
is  wont  to  appropriate  as  '  my  colour '.  A  collection  of 
such  perfectly  spontaneous  preferences  is  a  desideratum  in 
the  study  of  the  first  manifestations  of  a  feeling  for  colour. 
Care  must  be  taken  in  observing  these  selections  to  eliminate 
the  effects  of  association,  and  the  unintentional  influence  of 
example  and  authority,  as  when  a  child  takes  to  a  particular 
colour  because  it  is  '  mamma's  colour,'  that  is,  the  one  she 
appears  to  affect  in  her  dress  and  otherwise. 

The  values  of  the  several  colours  probably  disclose 
themselves  in  close  connexion  with  that  of  colour-contrast. 
Many  of  the  likings  of  a  child  of  three  in  the  matter  of 
flowers,  birds,  dresses,  and  so  on,  are  clearly  traceable  to  a 
growing  pleasure  in  colour-contrast.  Here  again  we  must 
distinguish  between  a  true  chromatic  and  a  merely  luminous 
effect.  The  dark  blue  sky  showing  itself  in  a  break  in  the 
white  clouds,  one  of  the  coloured  spectacles  which  delighted 
Miss  Shinn's  niece,  may  have  owed  much  of  its  attractiveness 
to  the  contrast  of  light  and  dark.  It  would  be  interesting  to 
experiment  with  children  of  three  with  a  view  to  determine 
whether  and  how  far  chromatic  contrast  pleases  when  it 
stands  alone,  and  is  not  supported  by  that  of  chiaroscuro. 

I  have  reason  to  believe  that  children,  like  the  less 
cultivated  adults,  prefer  juxtapositions  of  colours  which  lie 
far  from  one  another  in  the  colour-circle,  as  blue  and  red  or 
blue  and  yellow.  It  is  sometimes  said  that  the  practice 
and  the  history  of  painting  show  blue  and  red  to  be  a  more 
pleasing  combination  than  that  of  the  complementary  colours, 
blue  and  yellow.  It  would  be  well  to  test  children's  feeling 
on  this  matter.  It  would  be  necessary  in  this  inquiry  to 
see  that  the  child  did  not  select  for  combination  a  particular 
colour  as  blue  or  yellow  for  its  own  sake,  and  independently 
of  its  relation  to  its  companion — a  point  not  very  easy  to 
determine.  Care  would  have  to  be  taken  to  eliminate 
further  the  influence  of  authority  as  operating,  not  only  by 
instructing  the  child  what  combinations  are  best,  but  by 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  303 

setting  models  of  combination,  in  the  habitual  arrangements 
of  dress  and  so  forth.  This  too  would  probably  prove  to 
be  a  condition  not  easy  to  satisfy.1 

I  have  dwelt  at  some  length  on  the  first  germs  of  colour- 
appreciation,  because  this  is  the  one  feature  of  the  child's 
aesthetic  sense  which  has  so  far  lent  itself  to  definite  ex- 
perimental investigation.  It  is  very  different  when  we  turn 
to  the  first  appreciation  of  form.  That  little  children  have 
their  likings  in  the  matter  of  form,  is,  I  think,  indisputable, 
but  they  are  not  those  of  the  cultivated  adult.  A  quite 
small  child  will  admire  the  arch  of  a  rainbow,  and  the  round- 
ness of  a  kitten's  form,  though  in  these  instances  the  delight 
in  form  is  far  from  pure.  More  clearly  marked  is  the 
appreciation  of  pretty  graceful  movements,  as  a  kitten's 
boundings.  Perhaps  the  first  waking  up  to  the  graces  of 
form  takes  place  in  connexion  with  this  delight  in  the 
forms  of  motion,  a  delight  which  at  first  is  a  mixed  feeling, 
involving  the  interest  in  all  motion  as  suggestive  of  life,  to 
which  reference  has  already  been  made.  Do  not  all  of  us, 
indeed,  tend  to  translate  our  impressions  of  still  forms  back 
into  these  first  impressions  of  the  forms  of  motion  ? 

One  noticeable  feature  in  the  child's  first  response  to  the 
attractions  of  form  is  the  preference  given  to  '  tiny '  things. 
The  liking  for  small  natural  forms,  birds,  insects,  shells,  and 
so  forth,  and  the  prominence  of  such  epithets  as  '  wee,' 
'  tiny '  or  '  teeny,'  '  dear  little,'  in  the  child's  vocabulary  alike 
illustrate  this  early  direction  of  taste.  This  feeling  again 
is  a  mixed  one  ;  for  the  child's  interest  in  very  small  fragile- 
looking  things  has  in  it  an  element  of  caressing  tenderness 
which  again  contains  a  touch  of  fellow-feeling.  This  is 
but  one  illustration  of  the  general  rule  of  aesthetic  develop- 
ment in  the  case  of  the  individual  and  of  the  race  alike 


1  The  influence  of  such  authority  is  especially  evident  in  the 
selection  of  harmonious  shades  of  colour  for  dress,  etc.  Cf.  Miss 
Shinn,  op.  cit.,  p.  95. 


304  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

that  a  pure  contemplative  delight  in  the  aspect  of  things 
only  gradually  detaches  itself  from  a  mixed  feeling. 

If  now  we  turn  to  the  higher  aspects  of  form,  regularity 
of  outline,  symmetry,  proportion,  we  encounter  a  difficult}-. 
Many  children  acquire  while  quite  young  and  before  any 
formal  education  commences  a  certain  feeling  for  regularity 
and  symmetry.  But  is  this  the  result  of  a  mere  observation 
of  natural  or  other  forms  ?  Here  the  circumstances  of  the 
child  become  important.  He  lives  among  those  who  insist 
on  these  features  in  the  daily  activities  of  the  home.  In 
laying  the  cloth  of  the  dinner-table,  for  example,  a  child 
sees  the  regular  division  of  space  enforced  as  a  law.  Every 
time  he  is  dressed,  or  sees  his  mother  dress,  he  has  an 
object-lesson  in  symmetrical  arrangement.  And  so  these 
features  take  on  a  kind  of  ethical  Tightness  before  they  are 
judged  as  elements  of  aesthetic  value.  As  to  a  sense  of 
proportion  between  the  dimensions  or  parts  of  a  form,  the 
reflexion  that  this  involves  a  degree  of  intellectuality  above 
the  reach  of  many  an  adult  might  suggest  that  it  is  not 
to  be  expected  from  a  small  child  ;  and  this  conjecture 
will  be  borne  out  when  we  come  to  examine  children's 
first  essays  in  drawing. 

These  elementary  pleasures  of  light,  colour,  and  certain 
simple  aspects  of  form,  may  be  said  to  be  the  basis  of  a 
crude  perception  of  beauty  in  natural  objects  and  in  the 
products  of  human  workmanship.  A  quite  small  child  is 
capable  of  acquiring  a  real  admiration  for  a  beautiful  lady, 
in  the  appreciation  of  which  brightness,  colour,  grace  of 
movement,  the  splendour  of  dress,  all  have  their  part, 
while  the  charm  for  the  eye  is  often  reinforced  by  a  sweet 
and  winsome  quality  of  voice.  Such  an  admiration  is  not 
perfectly  aesthetic :  awe,  an  inkling  of  the  social  dignity  of 
dress,1  perhaps  a  longing  to  be  embraced  by  the  charmer, 
may  all  enter  into  it ;  yet  a  genuine  admiration  of  look  for 

1  On  the  nature  of  the  early  feeling  for  dress  see  Perez,  L'A  rt  d 
la  Poesie  chfz  V Enfant. 


THK   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  305 

its  own  sake  is  the  core  of  the  feeling.  In  other  childish 
admirations,  as  the  girl's  enthusiastic  worship  of  the  newly 
arrived  baby,  we  see  a  true  aesthetic  sentiment  mingled  with 
and  struggling,  so  to  speak,  to  extricate  itself  from  such 
'  interested  '  feelings  as  sense  of  personal  enrichment  by  the 
new  possession  and  of  family  pride.  In  the  likings  for 
animals,  again,  which  often  take  what  seem  to  us  capricious 
and  quaint  directions,  we  may  see  rudiments  of  aesthetic 
perceptions  half  hidden  under  a  lively  sense  of  absolute 
lordship  tempered  with  affection. 

Perhaps  the  nearest  approach  to  a  pure  aesthetic  enjoy- 
ment in  these  first  experiences  is  the  love  of  flowers.  The 
wee  round  wonders  with  their  mystery  of  velvety  colour 
are  well  fitted  to  take  captive  the  young  eye.  I  believe 
most  children  who  live  among  flowers  and  have  access  to 
them  acquire  something  of  this  sentiment,  a  sentiment  of 
admiration  for  beautiful  things  with  which  a  sort  of  dumb 
childish  sympathy  commonly  blends.  No  doubt  there  are 
marked  differences  among  children  here.  There  are  some 
who  care  only,  or  mainly,  for  their  scent,  and  the  strong 
sensibilities  of  the  olfactory  organ  appear  to  have  a  good 
deal  to  do  with  early  preferences  and  prejudices  in  the 
matter  of  flowers.1  Others  again  care  for  them  mainly  as  a 
means  of  personal  adornment,  though  I  am  disposed  to  think 
that  this  partially  interested  fondness  is  less  common  with 
children  than  with  many  adults.  It  is  sometimes  said  that 
the  love  of  flowers  is,  in  the  main,  a  characteristic  of  girls. 
I  think  however  that  if  one  takes  children  early  enough, 
before  a  consciousness  of  sex  and  of  its  proprieties  has  been 
allowed  to  develop  under  education,  the  difference  will  be 
but  slight.  Little  boys  of  four  or  thereabouts  often  show  a 
very  lively  sentiment  of  admiration  for  these  gems  of  the 
plant  world. 

In  much  of  this  first  crude  utterance  of  the  aesthetic 
sense  of  the  child  we  have  points  of  contact  with  the  first 

1  See  Perez,  L'Art  et  la  Poesie  chez  I' Enfant,  p.  go  f. 
2O 


306  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

manifestations  of  taste  in  the  race.  Delight  in  bright 
glistening  things,  in  gay  tints,  in  strong  contrasts  of  colour, 
as  well  as  in  certain  forms  of  movement,  as  that  of  feathers 
— the  favourite  personal  adornment — this  is  known  to  be 
characteristic  of  the  savage  and  gives  to  his  taste  in  the 
eyes  of  civilised  man  the  look  of  childishness.  On  the  other 
hand  it  is  doubtful  whether  the  savage  attains  to  the  senti- 
ment of  the  child  for  the  beauty  of  flowers.  Our  civilised 
surroundings,  meadows  and  gardens,  as  well  as  the  constant 
action  of  the  educative  forces  of  example,  soon  carry  the 
child  beyond  the  savage  in  this  particular. 

How  far  can  children  be  said  to  have  the  germ  of  a 
feeling  for  nature,  or,  to  use  the  more  comprehensive  modern 
term,  cosmic  emotion  ?  It  is  a  matter  of  common  observation 
that  they  have  not  the  power  to  embrace  a  multitude  of 
things  in  a  single  act  of  contemplation.  Hence  they  have 
no  feeling  for  landscape  as  a  harmonious  complex  of 
picturesquely  varied  parts.  When  they  are  taken  to  see  a 
1  view '  their  eye  instead  of  trying  to  embrace  the  whole,  as 
a  fond  parent  desires,  provokingly  pounces  on  some  single 
feature  of  interest,  and  often  one  of  but  little  aesthetic  value. 
People  make  a  great  mistake  in  taking  children  to  '  points 
of  view'  under  the  supposition  that  they  will  share  in 
grown  people's  impressions.  Perez  relates  that  some 
children  taken  to  the  Pic  du  Midi  found  their  chief  pleasure 
in  scrambling  up  the  peak  and  saying  that  they  were  on 
donkeys.1  Mere  magnitude  or  vastness  of  spectacle  does 
not  appeal  to  the  child,  for  a  sense  of  the  sublime  grows  out 
of  a  complex  imaginative  process  which  is  beyond  his 
young  powers.  So  far  as  immensity  affects  him  at  all, 
as  in  the  case  of  the  sea,  it  seems  to  excite  a  measure  of 
dread  in  face  of  the  unknown ;  and  this  feeling,  though 
having  a  certain  kinship  with  the  emotion  of  sublimity,  is 
distinct  from  this  last.  It  has  nothing  of  the  joyous  con- 
sciousness of  expansion  which  enters  into  the  later  feeling. 
1  Op.  cit.,  p.  103. 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  307 

It  is  only  to  certain  limited  objects  and  features  of  nature 
that  the  child  is  aesthetically  responsive.  He  knows  the 
loveliness  of  the  gilded  spring  meadow,  the  fascination  of 
the  sunlit  stream,  the  awful  mystery  of  the  wood,  and 
something  too  perhaps  of  the  calming  beauty  of  the  broad 
blue  sky.  That  is  to  say,  he  has  a  number  of  small  rootlets 
which  when  they  grow  together  will  develop  into  a  feeling 
for  nature. 

Here,  too,  the  analogy  between  the  child  and  the 
uncultured  nature-man  is  evident.  The  savage  has  no 
aesthetic  sentiment  for  nature  as  a  whole,  though  he  may 
feel  the  charm  of  some  of  her  single  features,  a  stream, 
a  mountain,  the  star-spangled  sky,  and  may  even  be 
affected  by  some  of  the  awful  aspects  of  her  changing 
physiognomy.  Are  we  not  told,  indeed,  that  a  true 
aesthetic  appreciation  of  the  picturesque  variety  of  nature's 
scenes  of  the  weird  charm  of  wild  places,  and  of  the 
sublime  fascinations  of  the  awful  and  repellent  mountain, 
are  quite  late  attainments  in  the  history  of  our  race  ? 1 

Early  Attitude  towards  Art. 

We  may  now  look  at  the  child's  attitude  towards  those 
objects  and  processes  of  human  art  which  from  the  first  form 
part  of  his  environment  and  make  an  educative  appeal  to 
his  senses  ;  and  here  we  may  begin  with  those  simple  musical 
effects  which  follow  up  certain  impressions  derived  from 
the  natural  world. 

It  has  been  pointed  out  that  sounds  form  a  chief  source 
of  the  little  child-heart's  first  trepidations.  Yet  this  prolific 
cause  of  disquietude,  when  once  the  first  alarming  effect 
of  strangeness  has  passed,  becomes  a  main  source  of  interest 
and  delight.  Some  of  nature's  sounds,  as  those  of  running 
water,  and  of  the  wind,  early  catch  the  ear,  and  excite 

1  An  excellent  sketch  of  the  growth  of  our  feeling  for  the  romantic 
and  sublime  beauty  of  mountains  is  given  by  Mr.  Leslie  Stephen  in 
one  of  the  most  delightful  of  his  works,  The  Playground  of  Europe. 


308  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

wonder  and  curiosity.  Miss  Shinn  illustrates  fully  in  the 
case  of  her  niece  how  the  interest  in  sounds  developed 
itself  in  the  first  years.1  This  pleasure  in  listening  to 
sounds  and  in  tracing  them  to  their  origin  forms  a  chief 
pastime  of  babyhood. 

^Esthetic  pleasure  in  sound  begins  to  be  differentiated 
out  of  this  general  interest  as  soon  as  there  arises  a  com- 
parison of  qualities  and  a  development  of  preferences. 
Thus  the  sound  of  metal  (when  struck)  is  preferred  to  that 
of  wood  or  stone.  A  nascent  feeling  for  musical  quality 
thus  emerges  which  probably  has  its  part  in  many  of  the 
first  likings  for  persons  ;  certain  pitches,  as  those  of  the 
female  voice,  and  possibly  timbres  being  preferred  to  others. 

Quite  as  soon,  at  least,  as  this  feeling  for  quality  of 
sound  or  tone,  there  manifests  itself  a  crude  liking  for 
rhythmic  sequence.  It  is  commonly  recognised  that  our 
pleasure  in  regularly  recurring  sounds  is  instinctive,  being 
the  result  of  our  whole  nervous  organisation.  We  can 
better  adapt  successive  acts  of  listening  when  sounds 
follow  at  regular  intervals,  and  the  movements  which 
sounds  evoke  can  be  much  better  carried  out  in  a  regular 
sequence.  The  infant  shows  us  this  in  his  well-known 
liking  for  well-marked  rhythms  in  tunes  which  he  ac- 
companies with  suitable  movements  of  the  arms,  head,  etc. 

The  first  likings  for  musical  composition  are  based  on 
this  instinctive  feeling  for  rhythm.  It  is  the  simple  tunes, 
with  well-marked  easily  recognisable  time-divisions,  which 
first  take  the  child's  fancy,  and  he  knows  the  quieting  and 
the  exciting  qualities  of  different  rhythms  and  times. 
Where  rhythm  is  less  marked,  or  grows  highly  complex, 
the  motor  responses  being  confused,  the  pleasurable 
interest  declines.  It  is  the  same  with  the  rhythmic 
qualities  of  verses.  The  jingling  rhythms  which  their  souls 
love  are  of  simple  structure,  with  short  feet  well  marked 
off,  as  in  the  favourite,  '  Jack  and  Gill  '. 
1  Op  dt.,  p.  115  ff. 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  309 

Coming  now  to  art  as  representative  we  find  that  a 
child's  aesthetic  appreciation  waits  on  the  growth  of  intelli- 
gence, on  the  understanding  of  artistic  representation  as  con- 
trasted with  a  direct  presentation  of  reality. 

The  development  of  an  understanding  of  visual  repre- 
sentation or  the  imaging  of  things  has  already  been  touched 
upon.  As  Perez  points  out,  the  first  lesson  in  this  branch 
of  knowledge  is  supplied  by  the  reflexions  of  the  mirror, 
which,  as  we  have  seen,  the  infant  begins  to  take  for 
realities,  though  he  soon  comes  to  understand  that  they  are 
not  tangible  realities.  The  looking-glass  is  the  best  means 
of  elucidating  the  representative  function  of  the  image 
or  '  Bild '  just  because  it  presents  this  image  in  close 
proximity  to  the  reality,  and  so  invites  direct  compari- 
son with  this. 

In  the  case  of  pictures  where  this  direct  comparison  is 
excluded  we  might  expect  a  less  rapid  recognition  of  the 
representative  function.  Yet  children  show  very  early  that 
picture-semblances  are  understood  in  the  sense  that  they  call 
forth  reactions  similar  to  those  called  forth  by  realities.  A 
little  boy  was  observed  to  talk  to  pictures  at  the  end  of  the 
eighth  month.  This  perhaps  hardly  amounted  to  recogni- 
tion. Pollock  says  that  the  significance  of  pictures  "  was  in 
a  general  way  understood  "  by  his  little  girl  at  the  age  of 
thirteen  months.1  Miss  Shinn  tells  us  that  her  niece,  at 
the  age  of  forty-two  weeks,  showed  the  same  excitement  at 
the  sight  of  a  life-size  painting  of  a  cat  as  at  that  of  real 
cats.2  Ten  months  is  also  given  me  by  a  lady  as  the  date 
at  which  her  little  boy  recognised  pictures  of  animals  by 
naming  them  '  bow-wow,'  etc.,  without  being  prompted. 

This  early  recognition  of  pictures  is  certainly  remarkable 
even  when  we  remember  that  animals  have  the  germ  of  it. 
The  stories  of  recognition  by  birds  of  paintings  of  birds, 
and  by  dogs  of  portraits  of  persons,  have  to  do  with  fairly 

1  Mind,  iii.,  p.  393. 

-Notes  on  the  Development  of  a  Child,  i.,  p.  71  f. 


310  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

large  and  finished  paintings.1  A  child,  however,  will  '  re- 
cognise '  a  small  and  roughly  executed  drawing.  He  seems 
in  this  respect  to  surpass  the  powers  of  savages,  some  of 
whom,  at  least,  are  said  to  be  slow  in  recognising  pictorial 
semblances.  This  power,  which  includes  a  delicate  observa- 
tion of  form  and  an  acute  sense  of  likeness,  is  seen  most 
strikingly  in  the  recognition  of  individual  portraits.  Miss 
Shinn's  niece  in  her  fourteenth  month  picked  out  her  father's 
face  in  a  group  of  nine,  the  face  being  scarcely  more  than 
a  quarter  of  an  inch  in  diameter.2  I  noticed  the  same  fine- 
ness of  recognition  in  my  own  children. 

One  point  in  this  early  observation  of  pictures  is  curious 
enough  to  call  for  especial  remark.  A  friend  of  mine,  a 
psychologist,  writes  to  me  that  his  little  girl,  aged  three 
and  a  half,  "  does  not  mind  whether  she  looks  at  a  picture 
the  right  way  up  or  the  wrong  ;  she  points  out  what  you 
ask  for,  eyes,  feet,  hands,  tail,  etc.,  about  equally  well 
whichever  way  up  the  picture  is,  and  never  asks  to  have 
it  put  right  that  she  may  see  it  better  ".  The  same  thing 
was  noticed  in  the  other  children  of  the  family,  and  the 
mother  tells  me  that  her  mother  observed  it  in  her  children. 
I  have  found  a  further  illustration  of  this  indifference  to  the 
position  of  a  picture  in  the  two  children  of  another  friend 
of  mine.  Professor  Petrie  tells  me  that  he  once  watched 
an  Arab  boy  looking  at  a  picture-book.  One,  a  drawing  of 
horses  and  chariot,  happened  to  have  a  different  position 
from  the  rest,  so  that  the  book  being  held  as  before,  the 
horses  seemed  to  be  going  upwards  ;  but  the  boy  was  not 
in  the  least  incommoded,  and  without  attempting  to  turn 
the  book  round  easily  made  it  out.  These  facts  are  curious 
as  illustrating  the  skill  of  the  young  eye  in  deciphering. 
They  may  possibly  have  a  further  significance  as  showing 
how  what  we  call  position — the  arrangement  of  a  form  in 

1  See  Romanes,  Animal  Intelligence,  pp.  311  and  453  ft'.      The  only 
exception  is  a  photograph  which  is  said  to  have  been  '  large,'  p.  453. 
*O/>.  cit.,  i.,  p.  74. 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  31 1 

relation  to  a  vertical  line — is  a  comparatively  artificial  view 
of  which  a  child  as  yet  takes  little  if  an}-  account.  He 
may  be  able  to  concentrate  his  attention  so  well  on  form 
proper  that  he  is  indifferent  to  the  point  how  the  form  is 
placed.  Yet  this  matter  is  one  which  well  deserves  further 
investigation.1 

A  further  question  arises  as  to  whether  this  'recognition' 
of  pictures  by  children  towards  the  end  of  the  first  year 
necessarily  implies  a  grasp  of  the  idea  of  a  picture,  that  is, 
of  a  representation  or  copy  of  something.  The  first  re- 
actions of  a  child,  smiling,  etc.,  on  seeing  mirror-images 
and  pictures,  do  not  seem  to  show  this,  but  merely  that 
he  is  affected  much  as  he  would  be  by  the  presence  of 
the  real  object,  or,  at  most,  that  he  recognises  the  picture 
as  a  kind  of  thing.  The  same  is,  I  think,  true  of  the  so- 
called  recognition  of  pictures  by  animals. 

That  children  do  not,  at  first,  seize  the  pictorial  or 
representative  function  is  seen  in  the  familiar  fact  that  they 
will  touch  pictures  as  they  touch  shadows  and  otherwise 
treat  them  as  if  they  were  tangible  realities.  Thus  Pollock's 
little  girl  attempted  to  smell  at  the  trees  in  a  picture  and 
pretended  '  to  feed  some  pictorial  dogs. 

When  the  first  clear  apprehension  of  the  pictorial  function 
is  reached,  it  is  difficult  to  say.  Miss  Shinn  thought  that 
her  niece  "  understood  the  purport  of  a  picture  quite  well "  at 
the  age  of  forty-five  weeks.  She  draws  this  conclusion  from 
the  fact  that  at  this  date  the  child  in  answer  to  the  question 
4  Where  are  the  flowers? '  leaned  over  and  touched  the  painted 
flowers  on  her  aunt's  gown,  and  then  looked  out  to  the  garden 
with  a  cry  of  desire.-  But  this  inference  seems  to  me  very 
risky.  All  that  the  child's  behaviour  proves  is  that  she 
'classed'  real  and  painted  flowers  together,  while  she  recog- 

1  Professor  Petrie  reminds  me  that  a  like  absence  of  the  percep- 
tion of  position  shows  itself  in  the  way  in  which  letters  are  drawn 
in  early  Greek  and  Phoenician  writings. 

*0p.  fit.,  i.,  p.  72. 


312  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

nised  the  superiority  of  the  former  as  the  tangible  and 
probably  the  odorous  ones.  The  strongest  evidence  of 
recognition  of  pictorial  function  by  children  is,  I  think, 
their  ability  to  recognise  the  portrait  of  an  individual.  But 
even  this  is  not  quite  satisfactory.  It  is  conceivable,  at  least, 
that  a  child  may  look  on  a  photograph  of  his  father  as  a 
kind  of 'double'.  The  boy  C.  took  his  projected  photograph 
very  seriously  as  a  kind  of  doubling  of  himself.  The  story 
of  the  dog,  a  Dandy  Dinmont  terrier,  that  trembled  and 
barked  at  a  portrait  of  his  dead  mistress1  seems  to  me  to 
bear  this  out.  It  would  surely  be  rather  absurd  to  say  that 
the  demonstrations  of  this  animal,  whatever  they  may  have 
meant,  prove  that  he  took  the  portrait  to  be  a  memento- 
likeness  of  his  dead  mistress. 

We  are  apt  to  forget  how  difficult  and  abstract  a  concep- 
tion is  that  of  pictorial  representation,  how  hard  it  is  to 
look  at  a  thing  as  pure  semblance  having  no  value  in  itself, 
but  only  as  standing  for  something  else.  A  like  slowness 
on  the  part  of  the  child  to  grasp  a  sign,  as  such,  shows  itself 
here  as  in  the  case  of  verbal  symbols.  Children  will,  quite 
late,  especially  when  feeling  is  aroused  and  imagination 
specially  active,  show  a  disposition  to  transform  the  sem- 
blance into  the  thing.  Miss  Shinn  herself  points  out  that 
her  niece,  who  seems  to  have  been  decidedly  quick,  was  as 
late  as  the  twenty-fifth  month  touched  with  pity  by  a  picture 
of  a  lamb  caught  in  a  thicket,  and  tried  to  lift  the  painted 
branch  that  lay  across  the  lamb.  In  her  thirty-fifth  month, 
again,  when  looking  at  a  picture  of  a  chamois  defending  her 
little  one  from  an  eagle,  "she  asked  anxiously  if  the  mamma 
would  drive  the  eagle  away,  and  presently  quite  simply 
and  unconsciously  placed  her  little  hand  edgewise  on  the 
picture  so  as  to  make  a  fence  between  the  eagle  and  the 
chamois".'2  Such  ready  confusion  of  pictures  with  realities 
shows  itself  in  the  fourth  year  and  later.  A  boy  nearly 

1  Romanes,  op.  cit.,  p.  453. 
-Op.  cit.,  ii.,  p.  104. 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  313 

five  was  observed  to  strike  at  the  figures  in  a  picture 
and  to  exclaim:  "I  can't  break  them".  The  Worcester 
Collection  of  observations  illustrates  the  first  confused  idea 
of  a  picture.  "One  day  F.,  a  boy  of  four,  called  on  a  friend, 
Mrs.  C.,  who  had  just  received  a  picture,  representing  a 
scene  in  winter,  in  which  people  were  going  to  church,  some 
on  foot  and  others  in  sleighs.  F.  was  told  whither  they 
were  going.  The  next  day  he  came  and  noticed  the  picture, 
and  looking  at  Mrs.  C.  and  then  at  the  picture  said: 
'  Why,  Mrs.  C.,  them  people  haven't  got  there  yet,  have 
they  ? '  " 

All  this  points,  I  think,  to  a  slow  and  gradual  emergence 
of  the  idea  of  representation  or  likeness.  If  a  child  is  capable 
in  moments  of  intense  imagination  of  confusing  his  battered 
doll  with  a  living  reality,  he  may  be  expected  to  act  similarly 
with  respect  to  the  fuller  likeness  of  a  picture.  Vividness  of 
imagination  tends  in  the  child  as  in  the  savage,  and  in- 
deed in  all  of  us,  to  invest  a  semblance  with  something  of 
reality.  We  are  able  to  control  the  illusory  tendency  and 
to  keep  it  within  the  limits  of  an  aesthetic  semi-illusion  ;  not 
so  the  child.  Is  it  too  fanciful  to  suppose  that  the  belief  of 
the  savage  in  the  occasional  visits  of  the  real  spirit-god 
to  his  idol  has  for  its  psychological  motive  the  impulse 
which  prompts  the  child  ever  and  again  to  identify  his 
toys  and  even  his  pictures  with  the  realities  which  they 
represent  ? 

As  might  be  expected  this  impulse  to  confuse  represen- 
tation and  represented  reality  shows  itself  very  distinctly 
in  the  first  reception  of  dramatic  spectacle.  If  you  dress 
up  as  Father  Christmas,  your  child,  even  though  he  is  told 
that  you  are  his  father,  will  hardly  be  able  to  resist  the 
illusion  that  your  disguise  so  powerfully  induces.  Cuvier 
relates  that  a  boy  of  ten  on  watching  a  stage  scene  in 
which  troops  were  drawn  up  for  action,  broke  out  in  loud 
protestations  to  the  actor  who  was  taking  the  part  of  the 
general,  telling  him  that  the  artillery  was  \vrongly  placed, 


314  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

and  so  forth.1  This  reminds  one  of  the  story  of  the  sailors 
who  on  a  visit  to  a  theatre  happened  to  see  a  representation 
of  a  mutiny  on  board  ship,  and  were  so  excited  that  they 
rushed  on  the  stage  and  took  sides  with  the  authorities  in 
quelling  the  movement. 

I  believe  that  this  same  tendency  to  take  art-representa- 
tions for  realities  reappears  in  children's  mental  attitude 
towards  stories.  A  story  by  its  narrative  form  seems  to 
tell  of  real  events,  and  children,  as  we  all  know,  are  wont 
to  believe  tenaciously  that  their  stories  are  true.  I  think  I 
have  observed  a  disposition  in  imaginative  children  to  go 
beyond  this,  and  to  give  present  actuality  to  the  scenes  and 
events  described.  And  this  is  little  to  be  wondered  at 
when  one  remembers  that  even  grown  people,  familiar  with 
the  devices  of  art-imitation,  tend  now  and  again  to  fall  into 
this  confusion.  Only  a  few  days  ago,  as  I  was  reading  an 
account  by  a  friend  of  mine  of  a  perilous  passage  in  an 
Alpine  ascent,  accomplished  years  ago,  I  suddenly  caught 
myself  in  the  attitude  of  proposing  to  shout  out  to  stop 
him  from  venturing  farther.  A  vivid  imaginative  realisa- 
tion of  the  situation  had  made  it  for  the  moment  a  present 
actuality. 

Careful  observations  of  the  first  attitudes  of  the  child 
mind  towards  representative  art  are  greatly  needed.  We 
should  probably  find  considerable  diversity  of  behaviour. 
The  presence  of  a  true  art-feeling  would  be  indicated  by 
a  special  quickness  in  the  apprehension  of  art-semblance  as 
such. 

In  these  first  reactions  of  the  young  mind  to  the  stimu- 
lus of  art-presentation  we  may  stud}*  other  aspects  of  the 
aesthetic  aptitude.  Very  quaint  and  interesting  is  the 
exacting  realism  of  these  first  appreciations.  A  child  is 
apt  to  insist  on  a  perfect  detailed  reproduction  of  the 
familiar  reality.  And  here  one  may  often  trace  the  fine 
observation  of  these  early  years.  Listen,  for  example,  to 
1  Quoted  by  Perez,  op.  cit..  p.  216. 


TDK    CHILD    AS    ARTIST.  315 

the  talk  of  the  little  critic  before  a  drawing  of  a  horse  or  a 
railway  train,  and  you  will  be  surprised  to  find  how  closely 
and  minutely  he  has  studied  the  forms  of  things.  It  is  the 
same  with  other  modes  of  art-representation.  Perez  gives 
an  amusing  instance  of  a  boy,  aged  four,  who  when  taken 
to  a  play  was  shocked  at  the  anomaly  of  a  chamber-maid 
touching  glasses  with  her  master  on  a  fete  day.  "  In  our 
home,"  exclaimed  the  stickler  for  regularities,  to  the  great 
amusement  of  the  neighbours,  "  we  don't  let  the  nurse  drink 
like  that."  *  It  is  the  same  with  story.  Children  are  liable 
to  be  morally  hurt  if  anything  is  described  greatly  at 
variance  with  the  daily  custom.  ^Esthetic  Tightness  is  as 
yet  confused  with  moral  Tightness  or  social  propriety, 
which,  as  we  have  seen,  has  its  instinctive  support  in  the 
child's  mind  in  respect  for  custom. 

Careful  observation  will  disclose  in  these  first  frankly 
expressed  impressions  the  special  directions  of  childish 
taste.  The  preferences  of  a  boy  of  four  in  the  matter  of 
picture-books  tell  us  where  his  special  interests  lie,  what 
things  he  finds  pretty,  and  how  much  of  a  genuine  aesthetic 
faculty  he  is  likely  to  develop  later  on.  Here,  again,  there 
is  ample  room  for  more  careful  studies  directed  to  the 
detection  of  the  first  manifestations  of  a  pure  delight  in 
things  as  beautiful,  as  charming  at  once  the  senses  and 
the  imagination. 

The  first  appearances  of  that  complex  interest  in  life 
and  personality  which  fills  so  large  a  place  in  our  aesthetic 
pleasures  can  be  best  noted  in  the  behaviour  of  the  child's 
mind  towards  dramatic  spectacle  and  story.  The  awful 
ecstatic  delight  with  which  a  child  is  apt  to  greet  any 
moving  semblance  carrying  with  it  the  look  of  life  and 
action  is  something  which  some  of  us,  like  Goethe,  can 
recall  among  our  oldest  memories.  The  old-fashioned 
moving  '  Schatten-bilder,'  for  which  the  gaudy  but  rigid 
pictures  of  the  magic  lantern  are  but  a  poor  substitute,  the 
1  Op.  cit.,  pp.  215,  216. 


316  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

puppet-show,  with  what  a  delicious  wonder  have  these 
filled  the  childish  heart.  And  as  to  the  entrancing, 
enthralling  delight  of  the  story — well  Thackeray  and  others 
have  tried  to  describe  this  for  us. 

Of  very  special  interest  in  these  early  manifestations  of 
a  feeling  for  art  is  the  appearance  of  a  crude  form  of  the 
two  emotions  to  which  all  representations  of  life  and  character 
make  appeal— the  feeling  for  the  comic,  and  for  the  tragic 
side  of  things.  What  wre  may  call  the  adult's  fallacy,  the 
tendency  to  judge  children  by  grown-up  standards,  fre- 
quently shows  itself  in  an  expectation  that  their  laughter 
will  follow  the  directions  of  our  own.  I  remember  having 
made  the  mistake  of  putting  those  delightful  books,  Tom 
Sawyer  and  Huckleberry  Finn,  into  the  hands  of  a  small 
boy  with  a  considerable  sense  of  fun,  and  having  been 
humiliated  at  discovering  that  there  was  no  response. 
Children's  fun  is  of  a  very  elemental  character.  They  are 
mostly  tickled,  I  suspect,  by  the  spectacle  of  some  upsetting 
of  the  proprieties,  some  confusion  of  the  established 
distinctions  of  rank.  Dress,  as  we  have  seen,  has  an 
enormous  symbolic  value  for  the  child's  mind,  and  any 
confusion  here  is  apt  to  be  specially  laughter-provoking. 
One  child  between  three  and  four  was  convulsed  at  the 
sight  of  his  baby  bib  fastened  round  the  neck  of  his  bearded 
sire.  There  is,  too,  a  considerable  element  of  rowdiness 
in  children's  sense  of  the  comical,  as  may  be  seen  by  the 
enduring  popularity  of  the  spectacle  of  Punch's  successful 
misdemeanours  and  bravings  of  the  legal  authority. 

Since  children  are  apt  to  take  spectacles  with  an  exacting 
seriousness,  it  becomes  interesting  to  note  how  the  two 
moods,  realistic  stickling  for  correctness,  and  rollicking 
hilarity  at  the  sight  of  the  disorderly,  behave  in  relation 
one  to  another.  More  facts  are  needed  on  this  point.  It 
is  probable  that  we  have  here  to  do  in  part  with  a  permanent 
difference  of  temperament.  There  are  serious  matter-of- 
fact  little  minds  which  are  shocked  by  a  kind  of  spectacle  or 


THK   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  317 

narrative  that  would  give  boundless  delight  to  a  more  elastic 
fun-loving  spirit.  But  discarding  these  permanent  differences 
of  disposition,  I  think  that  in  general  the  sense  of  fun,  the 
delight  in  the  topsy-turviness  of  things,  is  apt  to  develop 
later  than  the  serious  realistic  attitude  already  referred  to. 
Here,  too,  it  is  probable  that  the  evolution  of  the  individual 
follows  that  of  the  race :  the  solemnities  of  custom  and 
ritual  weigh  so  heavily  at  first  on  the  savage-mind  that 
there  is  no  chance  for  sprightly  laughter  to  show  himself. 
However  this  be,  most  young  children  appear  to  be  unable 
to  appreciate  true  comedy  where  the  incongruous  co-exists 
with  and  takes  on  one  half  of  its  charm  from  serious 
surroundings.  Their  laughter  is  best  called  forth  by  a 
broadly  farcical  show  in  which  all  serious  rules  are  set  at 
nought. 

Of  no  less  interest  in  this  attitude  of  the  child-mind 
towards  the  representations  by  art  of  human  character  and 
action  are  the  first  rude  manifestations  of  the  feeling  for  the 
tragic  side  of  life.  A  child  of  four  or  six  is  far  from  realising 
the  divine  necessity  which  controls  our  mortal  lives.  Yet 
he  will  display  a  certain  crude  feeling  for  thrilling  situation, 
exciting  adventure,  and  something,  too,  of  a  sympathetic 
interest  in  the  woes  of  mortals,  quadrupeds  as  well  as  bipeds. 
The  action,  the  situation,  may  easily  grow  too  painful  for 
an  imaginative  child  disposed  to  take  all  representative 
spectacle  as  reality  :  yet  the  absorbing  interest  of  the  action 
where  the  sadness  is  bearable  attests  the  early  development 
of  that  universal  feeling  for  the  sorrowful  fatefulness  of 
things  which  runs  through  all  imaginative  writings  from  the 
'  penny  dreadful '  upwards. 

Beginnings  of  Art-production. 

We  have  been  trying  to  catch  the  first  faint  manifesta- 
tions of  aesthetic  feeling  in  children's  contemplative  attitude 
towards  natural  objects  and  the  presentations  of  art.  We 
may  now  pass  to  what  is  a  still  more  interesting  department  of 


318  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

childish  aesthetics,  their  first  rude  attempts  at  art-production. 
We  are  wont  to  say  that  children  are  artists  in  embryo, 
that  in  their  play  and  their  whole  activity  they  manifest  the 
germs  of  the  art-impulse.  In  order  to  see  whether  this  idea 
is  correct  we  must  start  with  a  clear  idea  of  what  we  mean 
by  art-activity. 

I  would  define  art-activity  as  including  all  childish 
doings  which  are  consciously  directed  to  an  external  result 
recognised  as  beautiful,  as  directly  pleasing  to  sense  and 
imagination.  Thus  a  gesture,  or  an  intonation  of  voice, 
which  is  motived  by  a  feeling  for  what  is  '  pretty '  or  '  nice ' 
is  a  mode  of  art-activity  as  much  as  the  production  of  a 
more  permanent  aesthetic  object,  as  a  drawing. 

Now  if  we  look  at  children's  activity  we  shall  find  that 
though  much  of  it  implies  a  certain  germ  of  aesthetic  feeling 
it  is  not  pure  art-activity.  In  the  love  of  personal  adorn- 
ment, for  example,  we  see,  as  in  the  case  of  savages,  the 
aesthetic  motive  subordinated  to  another  and  personal  or 
interested  feeling,  vanity  or  love  of  admiration.  On  the  other 
hand,  in  children's  play,  which  undoubtedly  has  a  kinship 
with  art,  we  find  the  aesthetic  motive,  the  desire  to  produce 
something  beautiful,  very  much  in  the  background.  We 
have  then  to  examine  these  primitive  forms  of  activity  so 
as  to  try  to  disengage  the  genuine  art-element. 

One  of  the  most  interesting  of  these  early  quasi-artistic 
lines  of  activity  is  that  of  personal  adornment.  The  impulse 
to  maintain  appearances  appears  to  reach  far  down  in  animal 
life.  The  animal's  care  of  its  person  is  supported  by  two 
instincts,  the  impulse  to  frighten  or  overawe  others,  and 
especially  those  who  are,  or  are  likely  to  be,  enemies, 
illustrated  in  the  raising  of  feathers  and  hair  so  as  to  in- 
crease size  ;  and  the  impulse  to  attract,  which  probably 
underlies  the  habit  of  trimming  feathers  and  fur  among 
birds  and  quadrupeds.  These  same  impulses  are  said  to 
lie  at  the  root  of  the  elaborate  art  of  personal  adornment 
developed  by  savages.  The  anthropologist  divides  such 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  319 

ornament  into  alluring  and  alarming,  '  Reizschmuck '  and 
'  Schreckschmuck  '-1 

In  the  case  of  children's  attention  to  personal  appear- 
ance there  is  no  question  of  tracing  out  the  workings  of  a 
pure  instinct.  The  care  of  the  person  is  before  all  other 
things  inculcated  and  enforced  by  others,  and  forms,  indeed, 
a  main  branch  of  the  nursery  training.  To  a  mother,  as 
is  perfectly  natural,  a  child  is  apt  to  present  himself  as  the 
brightest  of  the  household  ornaments,  which  has  to  be  kept 
neat  and  spotless  with  even  greater  care  than  the  polished 
table  and  other  pretty  things.  This  early  drilling  is  likely 
to  be  unpleasant.  Many  children  resent  at  first  not  only 
soap  and  water  and  the  merciless  comb,  but  even  arrayings 
in  new  finery.  Adornment  is  forced  on  the  child  before 
the  instinct  has  had  time  to  develop  itself,  and  the  manner 
of  the  adornment  does  not  always  accommodate  itself  to  the 
natural  inclinations  of  the  childish  eye.  Hence  the  familiar 
fact  that  with  children  the  care  of  personal  appearance  when 
it  is  developed  takes  on  the  air  of  a  respect  for  law.  It  is 
more  than  half  a  moral  feeling,  a  readiness  to  be  shocked  at 
a.  breach  of  a  custom  enforced  from  the  first  by  example  and 
precept. 

Again,  the  instinct  of  adornment  in  the  child  is  often 
opposed  by  other  impulses.  I  have  already  touched  on  a 
small  child's  feeling  of  uneasiness  at  seeing  his  mother  in 
new  apparel.  A  like  apprehensiveness  shows  itself  in 
relation  to  his  own  dress.  Many  little  children  show  a 
marked  dislike  to  new  raiment.  As  I  have  remarked 
above,  a  change  of  dress  probably  disturbs  and  confuses 
their  sense  of  personality. 

In  spite,  however,  of  these  and  other  complicating 
circumstances  I  believe  that  the  instinct  to  adorn  the  person 
is  observable  in  children.  They  like  a  bit  of  finery  in  the 
shape  of  a  string  of  beads  or  of  daisies  for  the  neck,  a 
feather  for  the  hat,  a  scrap  of  brilliantly  coloured  ribbon  or 
1  See  Grosse,  Die  A  nf tinge  der  Kuiist,  pp.  106,  107. 


32O  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

cloth  as  a  bow  for  the  dress,  and  so  forth.  Imitation, 
doubtless,  plays  a  part  here,  but  it  is,  I  think,  possible  to 
allow  for  this,  and  still  to  detect  points  of  contact  with  the 
savage's  love  of  finery.  Perhaps,  indeed,  we  may  discern 
the  play  of  both  the  impulses  underlying  personal  orna- 
ment which  were  referred  to  above,  vis.,  the  alluring  and 
alarming.  Allowing  for  the  differences  of  intelligence,  of 
sexual  development  and  so  forth,  we  may  say  that  children 
betray  a  rudiment  of  the  instinct  to  win  admiration  by 
decorating  the  person,  and  also  of  the  instinct  to  overawe. 
A  small  boy's  delight  in  adding  to  his  height  and  formid- 
able appearance  by  donning  his  father's  tall  hat  is  pretty 
certainly  an  illustration  of  this  last. 

This  is  not  the  place  to  inquire  whether  the  love  of 
finery  in  children — a  very  variable  trait,  as  M.  Perez  and 
others  have  shown — is  wholly  the  outcome  of  vanity.  I 
would,  however,  just  remark  that  a  child  lost  in  the  vision 
of  himself  reflected  in  a  mirror  decked  out  in  new  apparel 
may  be  very  far  from  feeling  vanity  as  we  understand  the 
word.  The  pure  child-wonder  at  what  is  new  and 
mysterious  may  at  such  a  moment  overpower  other 
feelings,  and  make  the  whole  mental  condition  one  of 
dream-like  trance. 

Since  children  are  left  so  little  free  to  deck  themselves, 
it  is  of  course  hard  to  study  the  development  of  aesthetic 
taste  in  this  domain  of  art-like  activity.  Yet  the  quaint 
attempts  of  the  child  to  improve  his  appearance  throw  an 
interesting  light  on  his  aesthetic  preferences.  He  is  at 
heart  as  much  a  lover  of  glitter,  of  gaudy  colour,  as  his 
savage  prototype.  With  this  general  crudity  of  taste, 
individual  differences  soon  begin  to  show  themselves,  a 
child  developing  a  marked  bent,  now  to  modest  neatness 
and  refinement,  now  to  gaudy  display,  and  this,  it  may  be, 
in  direct  opposition  to  the  whole  trend  of  home  influence.1 

1  The  whole  subject  of  the  attitude  of  the  child-mind  towards 
dress  and  ornament  is  well  dealt  with  by  Perez,  op.  cit.,  chap.  i. 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  321 

Another  and  closely  connected  domain  of  activity 
which  is  akin  to  art  is  the  manifestation  of  grace  and 
charm  in  action.  Much  of  the  beauty  of  movement,  of 
gesture,  of  intonation,  in  a  young  child  may  be  uncon- 
scious, and  as  much  a  result  of  happy  physical  conditions 
as  the  pretty  gambols  of  a  kitten.  Yet  one  may  commonly 
detect  in  graceful  children  the  rudiment  of  an  aesthetic 
feeling  for  what  is  nice,  and  also  of  the  instinct  to  please. 
There  is,  indeed,  in  these  first  actions  and  manners,  into 
which  stupid  conventionality  has  not  yet  imported  all  kinds 
of  awkward  restraints,  as  when  the  little  girl  M.  would  kiss 
her  hand  spontaneously  to  other  babies  as  she  passed  them 
in  the  street,  something  of  the  simple  grace  and  dignity  of 
the  more  amiable  savages.  Now  a  feeling  for  what  is  grace- 
ful in  movement,  carriage,  speech  and  so  forth  is  no  clear 
proof  of  a  specialised  artistic  impulse  :  yet  it  attests  the 
existence  of  a  rudimentary  appreciation  of  what  is  beautiful, 
as  also  of  an  impulse  to  produce  this. 

In  the  forms  of  childish  activity  just  referred  to  we 
have  to  do  with  mixed  impulses  in  which  the  true  art- 
element  is  very  imperfectly  represented.  There  is  a  liking 
for  pretty  effect,  and  an  effort  to  realise  it,  only  the  effect 
is  not  prized  wholly  for  its  own  sake,  but  partly  as  a  means 
of  winning  the  smile  of  approval.  The  true  art-impulse 
is  characterised  by  the  love  of  shaping  beautiful  things  for 
their  own  sake,  by  an  absorbing  devotion  to  the  process 
of  creation,  into  which  there  enters  no  thought  of  any 
advantage  to  self,  and  almost  as  little  of  benefiting  others. 
Now  there  is  one  field  of  children's  activity  which  is  marked 
by  just  this  absorption  of  thought  and  aim,  and  that  is  play. 

To  say  that  play  is  art-like  has  almost  become  a  com- 
monplace. Any  one  can  see  that  when  children  are  at  play 
they  are  carried  away  by  pleasurable  activity,  are  thinking 
of  no  useful  result  but  only  of  the  pleasure  of  the  action 
itself.  They  build  their  sand  castles,  they  pretend  to  keep 
shop,  to  entertain  visitors,  and  so  forth,  for  the  sake  of  the 

21 


322  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

enjoyment  which  they  find  in  these  actions.  This  clearly 
involves  one  point  of  kinship  with  the  artist,  for  the  poet 
sings  and  the  painter  paints  because  they  love  to  do  so. 
It  is  evident,  moreover,  from  what  was  said  above  on  the 
imaginative  side  of  play  that  it  has  this  further  circum- 
stance in  common  with  art-production,  that  it  is  the  body- 
ing forth  of  a  mental  image  into  the  semblance  of  outward 
life.  Not  only  so,  play  exhibits  the  distinction  between 
imitation  and  invention — the  realistic  and  the  idealistic 
tendency  in  art — and  in  its  forms  comes  surprisingly  near 
representing  the  chief  branches  of  art-activity.  It  thus  fully 
deserves  to  be  studied  as  a  domain  in  which  we  may  look 
for  early  traces  of  children's  artistic  tendencies. 

If  by  play  we  understand  all  that  spontaneous  activity 
which  is  wholly  sustained  by  its  own  pleasurableness,  we 
shall  find  the  germ  of  it  in  those  aimless  movements  and 
sounds  which  are  the  natural  expression  of  a  child's  joyous 
life.  Such  outpourings  of  happiness  have  a  quasi-aesthetic 
character  in  so  far  as  they  follow  the  rhythmic  law  of  all 
action.  Where  the  play  becomes  social  activity,  that  is, 
the  concerted  action  of  a  number,  we  get  something  closely 
analogous  to  those  primitive  harmonious  co-ordinations  of 
movements  and  sounds  in  which  the  first  crude  music,  poetry 
and  dramatic  action  of  the  race  are  supposed  to  have  had 
their  common  origin. 

Such  naive  play-activity  acquires  a  greater  aesthetic  im- 
portance when  it  becomes  significant  or  representative  of 
something :  and  this  direction  appears  very  early  in  child- 
history.  The  impulse  to  imitate  the  action  of  another  seems 
to  be  developed  before  the  completion  of  the  first  half-year.1 
In  its  first  crude  form,  as  reproducing  a  gesture  or  sound 
uttered  at  the  moment  by  another,  it  enters  into  the  whole 

1  Preyer  places  the  first  imitative  movement  in  the  fourth  month 
(op.  cit.,  cap.  12).  Baldwin,  however,  dates  the  first  unmistakable 
appearance  in  the  case  of  his  little  girl  in  the  ninth  month  (Mental 
Development,  p.  131). 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  323 

of  social  or  concerted  play.  A  number  of  children  find  the 
harmonious  performance  of  a  series  of  dance  or  other  move- 
ments, such  as  those  of  the  kindergarten  games,  natural  and 
easy,  because  the  impulse  to  imitate,  to  follow  another's  lead, 
at  once  prompts  them  and  keeps  them  from  going  far  astray. 

It  is  a  higher  and  more  intellectual  kind  of  imitation  when 
a  child  recalls  the  idea  of  something  he  has  seen  done  and 
reproduces  the  action.  This  is  often  carried  out  under  the 
suggestive  force  of  objects  which  happen  to  present  them- 
selves at  the  time,  as  when  a  child  sees  an  empty  cup  and 
pretends  to  drink,  or  a  book  and  simulates  the  action  of 
reading  out  of  it,  or  a  pair  of  scissors  and  proceeds  to 
execute  snipping  movements.  In  other  cases  the  imitation 
is  more  spontaneous,  as  when  a  child  recalls  and  repeats 
some  funny  saying  that  he  has  heard. 

This  imitative  action  grows  little  by  little  more  complex, 
and  in  this  way  a  prolonged  make-believe  action  may  be 
carried  out.  Here,  it  is  evident,  we  get  something  closely 
analogous  to  histrionic  performance.  A  child  pantomimic- 
ally  representing  some  funny  action  comes,  indeed,  very 
near  to  the  mimetic  art  of  the  comedian. 

Meanwhile,  another  form  of  imitation  is  developing,  viz., 
the  production  of  semblances  in  things.  Early  illustrations 
of  this  impulse  are  the  making  of  a  river  out  of  the  gravy  in 
the  plate,  the  pinching  of  pellets  of  bread  till  they  take  on 
something  of  resemblance  to  known  forms.  One  child,  three 
years  old,  once  occupied  himself  at  table  by  turning  his 
plate  into  a  clock,  in  which  his  knife  (or  spoon)  and  fork 
were  made  to  act  as  hands,  and  cherry  stones  put  round 
the  plate  to  represent  the  hours.  Such  table-pastimes  are 
known  to  all  observers  of  children,  and  have  been  prettily 
touched  on  by  R.  L.  Stevenson.1 

Such  formative  touches  are,  at  first,  rough  enough,  the 
transformation  being  effected,  as  we  have  seen,  much 
more  by  the  alchemy  of  the  child's  imagination  than  by 

1  Virginibus  Puerisque,  '  Child's  Play  '. 


324  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  cunning  of  his  hands.  Yet,  crude  as  it  is,  and  showing 
at  first  almost  as  much  of  chance  as  of  design,  it  is  a  mani- 
festation of  the  same  plastic  impulse,  the  same  striving  to 
produce  images  or  semblances  of  things,  which  possesses 
the  sculptor  and  the  painter.  In  each  case  we  see  a  mind 
dominated  by  an  idea  and  labouring  to  give  it  outward 
embodiment.  The  more  elaborate  constructive  play  which 
follows,  the  building  with  sand  and  with  bricks,  with  which 
we  may  take  the  first  spontaneous  drawings,  are  the  direct 
descendant  of  this  rude  formative  activity.  The  kindergarten 
occupations,  most  of  all  the  clay-modelling,  make  direct 
appeal  to  this  half-artistic  plastic  impulse  in  the  child. 

In  this  imitative  play  we  see  from  the  first  the  tendency 
to  set  forth  what  is  characteristic  in  the  things  represented. 
Thus  in  the  acting  of  the  nursery  the  nurse,  the  coachman 
and  so  forth  are  given  by  one  or  two  broad  touches,  such 
as  the  presence  of  the  medicine-bottle  or  its  semblance,  or 
of  the  whip,  together,  perhaps,  with  some  characteristic 
manner  of  speaking.  In  this  way  child-play,  like  primitive 
art,  shows  a  certain  unconscious  selectiveness.  It  presents 
what  is  constant  and  typical,  imperfectly  enough  no  doubt. 
The  same  selection  of  broadly  distinctive  traits  is  seen  where 
some  individual  seems  to  be  represented.  There  is  a  precisely 
similar  tendency  to  a  somewhat  bald  typicalness  of  outline 
in  the  first  rude  attempts  of  children  to  form  semblances. 
This  will  be  fully  illustrated  presently  when  we  examine 
their  manner  of  drawing. 

As  observation  widens  and  grows  finer,  the  first  bald 
abstract  representation  becomes  fuller  and  more  life-like. 
A  larger  number  of  distinctive  traits  is  taken  up  into  the 
representation.  Thus  the  coachman's  talk  becomes  richer, 
fuller  of  reminiscences  of  the  stable,  etc.,  and  so  colour  is 
given  to  the  dramatic  picture.  A  precisely  similar  process 
of  development  is  noticeable  in  the  plastic  activities.  The 
first  raw  attempt  to  represent  house  or  castle  is  improved 
upon,  and  the  image  grows  fuller  of  characteristic  detail  and 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  325 

more  life-like.  Here,  again,  we  may  note  the  parallelism 
between  the  evolution  of  play-activity  and  of  primitive 
art. 

This  movement  away  from  bare  symbolic  indication  to 
concrete  pictorial  representation  involves  a  tendency  to 
individualise,  to  make  the  play  or  the  shapen  semblance 
life-like  in  the  sense  of  representing  an  individual  reality. 
Such  individual  concreteness  may  be  obtained  by  a 
mechanical  reproduction  of  some  particular  action  and  scene 
of  real  life,  and  children  in  their  play  not  infrequently 
attempt  a  faithful  recital  or  portraiture  of  this  kind.  Such 
close  unyielding  imitation  shows  itself,  too,  now  and  again 
in  the  attempt  to  act  out  a  story.  Yet  with  bright  fanciful 
children  the  impulse  to  give  full  life  and  colour  to  the 
performance  rarely  stops  here.  Fresh  individual  life  is  best 
obtained  by  the  aid  of  invention,  by  the  intervention  of 
which  some  new  scene  or  situation,  some  new  grouping  of 
personalities,  is  realised.  Nothing  is  aesthetically  of  more 
interest  in  children's  play  than  the  first  cautious  intrusion 
into  the  domain  of  imitative  representation  of  this  impulse 
of  invention,  this  desire  for  the  new  and  fresh  as  distinct 
from  the  old  and  customary.  Perhaps,  too,  there  is  no  side 
of  children's  play  in  which  individual  differences  are  more 
clearly  marked  or  more  significant  than  this.  The  child  of 
bold  inventive  fancy  is  shocking  to  his  companion  whose 
whole  idea  of  proper  play  is  a  servile  imitation  of  the  scenes 
and  actions  of  real  life.  Yet  the  former  will  probably  be  found 
to  have  more  of  the  stuff  of  which  the  artist  is  compacted. 

All  such  invention,  moreover,  since  it  aims  at  securing 
some  more  vivacious  and  stirring  play-experience,  naturally 
comes  under  the  influence  of  the  childish  instinct  of  exaggera- 
tion. I  mean  by  this  the  untaught  art  of  vivifying  and 
strengthening  a  description  or  representation  by  adding 
touch  to  touch.  In  the  representations  of  play,  this  love  of 
colour,  of  strong  effect,  shows  itself  now  in  a  piling  up  of 
the  beautiful,  gorgeous,  or  wonderful,  as  when  trying  to  act 


326  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

some  favourite  scene  from  fairy-story,  or  some  grand  social 
function,  now  in  a  bringing  together  of  droll  or  pathetic 
incidents  so  as  to  strengthen  the  comic  or  the  tragic  feeling 
of  the  play-action.  In  all  this — which  has  its  counterpart 
in  the  first  crude  attempts  of  the  art  of  the  race  to  break 
the  tight  bonds  of  a  servile  imitation — we  have,  I  believe, 
the  germ  of  what  in  our  more  highly  developed  art  we  call 
the  idealising  impulse. 

I  have,  perhaps,  said  enough  to  show  that  children's 
play  is  in  many  respects  analogous  to  art  of  the  simpler 
kind,  also  that  it  includes  within  itself  lines  of  activity  which 
represent  the  chief  directions  of  art-development.1 

Yet  though  art-like  this  play  is  not  fully  art.  In  play  a 
child  is  too  self-centred,  if  I  may  so  say.  The  scenes  he 
acts  out,  the  semblances  he  shapes  with  his  hands,  are  not 
produced  as  having  objective  value,  but  rather  as  providing 
himself  with  a  new  environment.  The  peculiarity  of  all 
imaginative  play,  its  puzzle  for  older  people,  is  its  contented 
privacy.  The  idea  of  a  child  playing  as  an  actor  is  said  to 
'  play '  in  order  to  delight  others  is  a  contradiction  in  terms. 
As  I  have  remarked  above,  the  pleasure  of  a  child  in  what  we 
call  '  dramatic  '  make-believe  is  wholly  independent  of  any 
appreciating  eye.  "  I  remember,"  writes  R.  L.  Stevenson, 
"  as  though  it  were  yesterday,  the  expansion  of  spirit,  the 
dignity  and  self-reliance,  that  came  with  a  pair  of  mus- 
tachios  in  burnt  cork  even  when  there  ivas  none  to  see" z  The 
same  thing  is  true  of  concerted  play.  A  number  of  children 
playing  at  being  Indians,  or  what  not,  do  not  '  perform  'for 
one  another.  The  words  '  perform,'  '  act '  and  so  forth  all 
seem  to  be  out  of  place  here.  What  really  occurs  in  this 
case  is  a  conjoint  vision  of  a  new  world,  a  conjoint  imagina- 
tive realisation  of  a  new  life. 

This    difference    between    play   and   art   is    sometimes 

1  The  telling  of  stories  to  other  children  does  not,  I  conceive,  fall 
under  my  definition  of  play.     It  is  child-art  properly  so  called. 
*  Virginibus  Puerisque,  '  Child's  Play  '. 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  327 

pushed  to  the  point  of  saying  that  art  has  its  root  in  the 
social  impulse,  the  wish  to  please.1  This  I  think  is  simpli- 
fying too  much.  Art  is  no  doubt  a  social  phenomenon,  as 
Guyau  and  others  have  shown.  It  has  been  well  said  that 
"  an  individual  art — in  the  strictest  sense — even  if  it  were 
conceivable  is  nowhere  discoverable  ".2  That  is  to  say  the 
artist  is  constituted  as  such  by  a  participation  in  the  common 
consciousness,  the  life  of  his  community,  and  his  creative 
impulse  is  controlled  and  directed  by  a  sense  of  common  or 
objective  values.  Yet  to  say  that  art  is  born  of  the  instinct 
to  please  or  attract  is  to  miss  much  of  its  significance.  The 
ever-renewed  contention  of  artists,  '  art  for  art's  sake,'  points 
to  the  fact  that  they,  at  least,  recognise  in  their  art-activity 
something  spontaneous,  something  of  the  nature  of  self- 
expression,  self-realisation,  and  akin  to  the  child's  play. 
May  we  not  say,  then,  that  the  impulse  of  the  artist  has  its 
roots  in  the  happy  semi-conscious  activity  of  the  child  at 
play,  the  all-engrossing  effort  to  '  utter,'  that  is,  give  outer 
form  and  life  to  an  inner  idea,  and  that  the  play-impulse 
becomes  the  art-impulse  (supposing  it  is  strong  enough  to 
survive  the  play-years)  when  it  is  illumined  by  a  growing 
participation  in  the  social  consciousness,  and  a  sense  of  the 
common  worth  of  things,  when,  in  other  words,  it  becomes 
conscious  of  itself  as  a  power  of  shaping  semblances  which 
shall  have  value  for  other  eyes  or  ears,  and  shall  bring 
recognition  and  renown  ?  Or,  to  put  it  somewhat  differently, 
may  we  not  say  that  art  has  its  twin-rootlets  in  the  two 
directions  of  childish  activity  which  we  have  considered, 
viz.,  the  desire  to  please  so  far  as  this  expresses  itself  in 
dress,  graceful  action,  and  so  forth,  and  the  entrancing  iso- 
lating impulse  of  play  ?  However  we  express  the  relation, 
I  feel  sure  that  we  must  account  for  the  origin  of  art  by 
some  reference  to  play.  A  study  of  the  art  of  savages,  more 

1  According  to  Mr.  H.   Rutgers  Marshall  art-activity  takes  its 
rise  in  the  instinct  to  attract  others  (Pain,  Pleasure,  and  ^Esthetics). 
-  Grosse,  Anfiinge  der  Kunst,  p.  48. 


328  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

especially  perhaps  of  the  representations  of  fighting  and 
hunting  in  their  pantomime-dances,  seems  to  show  that  art 
is  continuous  with  play-activity. 

To  insist  on  this  organic  connexion  between  play  and 
art  is  not  to  say  that  every  lively  player  is  fitted  to  become 
an  art-aspirant.  The  artistic  ambition  implies  too  rare  a 
complex  of  conditions  for  us  to  be  able  to  predict  its 
appearance  in  this  way.  It  may,  however,  be  thrown  out 
as  a  suggestion  to  the  investigator  of  the  first  manifestations 
of  artistic  genius  that  he  might  do  well  to  cast  his  eye  on 
the  field  of  imaginative  play.  It  will  possibly  be  found  that 
although  not  a  romping  riotous  player,  nor  indeed  much 
disposed  to  join  other  children  in  their  pastimes,  the  original 
child  has  his  own  distinctive  style  of  play,  which  marks  him 
out  as  having  more  than  other  children  of  that  impulse  to 
dream  of  far-off  things,  and  to  bring  them  near  in  the 
illusion  of  outer  semblance,  which  enters  more  or  less 
distinctly  into  all  art. 

I  have  left  myself  no  space  to  speak  of  the  child's  first 
attempts  at  art  as  we  understand  it.  Some  of  this  art- 
activity,  more  particularly  the  earliest  weaving  of  stories, 
is  characteristic  enough  to  deserve  a  special  study.  I  have 
made  a  small  collection  of  early  stories,  and  some  of  them 
are  interesting  enough  to  quote.  Here  is  a  quaint  example 
of  the  first  halting  manner  of  a  child  of  two  and  a  half 
years  as  invention  tries  to  get  away  from  the  sway  of 
models  :  "  Three  little  bears  went  out  a  walk  and  they 
found  a  stick,  and  they  poked  the  fire  with  it,  and  they 
poked  the  fire  and  then  went  a  walk  ".  Soon,  however,  the 
young  fancy  is  apt  to  wax  bolder,  and  then  we  get  some 
fine  invention.  A  boy  of  five  years  and  a  quarter  living  at 
the  sea-side  improvised  as  follows.  He  related  "that  one 
day  he  went  out  on  the  sea  in  a  lifeboat  when  suddenly  he 
saw  a  big  whale,  and  so  he  jumped  down  to  catch  it,  but 
it  was  so  big  that  he  climbed  on  it  and  rode  on  it  in  the 
water,  and  all  the  little  fishes  laughed  so  ". 


THE   CHILD   AS   ARTIST.  329 

With  this  comic  story  may  be  compared  a  more  serious 
not  to  say  tragic  one  from  the  lips  of  a  girl  one  month 
younger,  and  characterised  by  an  almost  equal  fondness 
for  the  wonderful.  "  A  man  wanted  to  go  to  heaven  before 
he  died.  He  said,  '  I  don't  want  to  die,  and  I  must  see 
heaven!'  Jesus  Christ  said  he  must  be  patient- like  other 
people.  He  then  got  so  angry,  and  screamed  out  as  loud 
as  he  could,  and  kicked  up  his  heels  as  high  as  he  could, 
and  they  (the  heels)  went  into  the  sky,  and  the  sky  fell 
down  and  broke  earth  all  to  pieces.  He  wanted  Jesus 
Christ  to  mend  the  earth  again,  but  he  wouldn't,  so  this  was 
a  good  punishment  for  him."  This  last,  which  is  the  work 
of  one  now  grown  into  womanhood  and  no  longer  a  story- 
teller, is  interesting  in  many  ways.  The  wish  to  go  to 
heaven  without  dying  is,  as  I  know,  a  motive  derived  from 
child-life.  The  manifestations  of  displeasure  could,  one 
supposes,  only  have  been  written  by  one  who  was  herself 
experienced  in  the  ways  of  childish  '  tantrums '.  The 
naive  conception  of  sky  and  earth,  and  lastly  the  moral 
issue  of  the  story,  are  no  less  instructive. 

These  samples  may  serve  to  show  that  in  the  stories  of  by 
no  means  highly-gifted  children  we  come  face  to  face  with 
interesting  traits  of  the  young  mind,  and  can  study  some  of 
the  characteristic  tendencies  of  early  and  primitive  art.1  Of 
the  later  efforts  to  imitate  older  art,  as  verse  writing,  the 
same  cannot,  I  think,  be  said.  Children's  verses  so  far  as 
I  have  come  across  them  are  poor  and  stilted,  showing  all 
the  signs  of  the  cramping  effect  of  models  and  rules  to  which 
the  child-mind  cannot  easily  accommodate  itself,  and  want- 
ing all  true  childish  inspiration.  No  doubt,  even  in  these 
choking  circumstances,  childish  feeling  may  now  and  again 
peep  out.  The  first  prose  compositions,  letters  before  all  if 
they  may  be  counted  art,  give  more  scope  for  the  expression 

1  The  child's  feeling  for  climax  shown  in  these  is  further  illus- 
trated in  a  charming  story  taken  down  by  Miss  Shinn,  but  unfortu- 
nately too  long  to  quote  here.  See  Overland  Monthly,  vol.  xxiii.,  p.  19. 


33O  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

of  a  child's  feeling  and  the  characteristic  movements  of  his 
thought,  and  might  well  repay  study.1 

There  is  one  other  department  of  this  child-art  which 
clearly  does  deserve  to  be  studied  with  some  care — drawing. 
And  this  for  the  very  good  reason  that  it  is  not  wholly  a 
product  of  our  influence  and  education,  but  shows  itself  in 
its  essential  characteristics  as  a  spontaneous  self-taught 
activity  of  childhood  which  takes  its  rise,  indeed,  in  the 
play-impulse.  This  will  be  the  subject  of  the  next  essay. 

1  Perez  deals  with  children's  literary  compositions  in  the  work 
already  quoted  (chap.  ix.).  Cf.  Paola  Lombroso,  op.  cit.,  cap.  viii. 
and  ix. 


X. 

THE  YOUNG  DRAUGHTSMAN. 
First  Attempts  to  Draw. 

A  CHILD'S  first  attempts  at  drawing  are  pre-artistic  and  a 
kind  of  play,  an  outcome  of  the  instinctive  love  of  finding 
and  producing  semblances  of  things  illustrated  in  the  last 
essay.  Sitting  at  the  table  and  covering  a  sheet  of  paper 
with  line-scribble  he  is  wholly  self-centred, '  amusing  himself,' 
as  we  say,  and  caring  nothing  about  the  production  of  "  ob- 
jective values  ". 

Yet  even  in  the  early  stages  of  infantile  drawing  the 
social  element  of  art  is  suggested  in  the  impulse  of  the 
small  draughtsman  to  make  his  lines  indicative  of  some- 
thing to  others'  eyes,  as  when  he  bids  his  mother  look  at 
the  '  man,'  '  gee-gee,'  or  what  else  he  fancies  that  he  has 
delineated.1  And  this,  though  crude  enough  and  apt  to 
shock  the  aesthetic  sense  of  the  matured  artist  by  its  un- 
sightliness,  is  closely  related  to  art,  forming,  indeed,  in  a 
manner  a  preliminary  stage  of  pictorial  design. 

We  shall  therefore  study  children's  drawings  as  a  kind 
of  rude  embryonic  art.  In  doing  this  our  special  aim  will 
be  to  describe  and  explain  childish  characteristics.  This, 
again,  will  compel  us  to  go  to  some  extent  into  the  early 
forms  of  observation  and  imagination.  It  will  be  found,  I 

1  This  indicative  or  communicative  function  of  drawing  has,  we 
know,  played  a  great  part  in  the  early  stages  of  human  history. 
Modern  savages  employ  drawings  in  sand  as  a  means  of  imparting 
information  to  others,  e.g.,  of  the  presence  of  fish  in  a  lake,  see  Von 
Steinen,  Unter  den  Naturvulkern  Braziliens,  kap.  x.,  s.  243  f. 


332  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

think,  that  the  first  crude  drawings  are  valuable  as  throw- 
ing light  on  the  workings  of  children's  minds.  Perhaps, 
indeed,  it  may  turn  out  that  these  spontaneous  efforts  of 
the  childish  hand  to  figure  objects  are  for  the  psychologist 
a  medium  of  expression  of  the  whole  of  child-nature, 
hardly  less  instructive  than  that  of  early  speech. 

In  carrying  out  our  investigation  of  children's  drawings 
we  shall  need  to  make  a  somewhat  full  reference  to  the 
related  phenomena,  the  drawings  of  modern  savages  and 
those  of  early  art.  While  important  points  of  difference 
will  disclose  themselves  the  resemblances  are  important 
enough  to  make  a  comparison  not  only  profitable  but 
almost  indispensable. 

I  have  thought  it  best  to  narrow  the  range  of  the  inquiry 
by  keeping  to  delineations  of  the  human  figure  and  of 
animals,  especially  the  horse.  These  are  the  favourite 
topics  of  the  child's  pencil,  and  examples  of  them  are  easily 
obtainable. 

As  far  as  possible  I  have  sought  spontaneous  drawings 
of  quite  young  children,  vis.,  from  between  two  and  three 
to  about  six.1  In  a  strict  sense  of  course  no  child's  drawing 
is  absolutely  spontaneous  and  independent  of  external 
stimulus  and  guidance.  The  first  attempts  to  manage  the 
pencil  are  commonly  aided  by  the  mother,  who,  moreover, 
is  wont  to  present  a  model  drawing,  and,  what  is  even  more 
important  at  this  early  stage,  to  supply  model-movements 
of  the  arm  and  hand.  In  most  cases,  too,  there  is  some 
slight  amount  of  critical  inspection,  as  when  she  asks, '  Where 
is  papa's  nose  ?  '  '  Where  is  doggie's  tail  ?  '  Yet  perfect 
spontaneity,  even  if  obtainable,  is  not  necessary  here.  The 
drawings  of  men  and  quadrupeds  of  a  child  of  five  and 
later  disclose  plainly  enough  the  childish  fashion,  even 
though  there  has  been  some  slight  amount  of  elementary 
instruction.  Hence  I  have  not  hesitated  to  make  use  of 

1  Only  a  few  drawings  of  older  children  above  seven  have  been 
included. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  333 

drawings  sent  me  by  kindergarten  teachers.  I  may  add 
that  I  have  used  by  preference  the  drawings  executed  by 
children  in  elementary  schools,  as  these  appear  to  illustrate 
the  childish  manner  with  less  of  parental  interference  than 
is  wont  to  be  present  in  a  cultured  home. 

A  child's  drawing  begins  with  a  free  aimless  swinging 
of  the  pencil  to  and  fro,  which  movements  produce  a  chaos 
of  slightly  curved  lines.  These  movements  are  purely 
spontaneous,  or,  if  imitative,  are  so  only  in  the  sense  that 
they  follow  at  a  considerable  distance  the  movements  of 
the  mother's  pencil.1  They  may  be  made  expressive  or 
significant  in  two  ways.  In  the  first  place,  a  child  may  by 
varying  the  swinging  movements  accidentally  produce 
an  effect  which  suggests  an  idea  through  a  remote  resem- 
blance. A  little  boy  when  two  years  and  two  months, 
was  one  day  playing  in  this  wise  with  the  pencil,  and 
happening  to  make  a  sort  of  curling  line,  shouted  with 
excited  glee,  '  Puff,  puff !  '  i.e.,  smoke.  He  then  drew 
more  curls  with  a  rudimentary  intention  to  show  what  he 
meant.  In  like  manner  when  a  child  happens  to  bend  his 
line  into  something  like  a  closed  circle  or  ellipse  he  will 
catch  the  faint  resemblance  to  the  rounded  human  head 
and  exclaim, '  Mama  !  '  or  '  Dada  ! ' 

But  intentional  drawing  or  designing  does  not  always 
arise  in  this  way.  A  child  may  set  himself  to  draw,  and 
make  believe  that  he  is  drawing  something  when  he  is 
scribbling.  This  is  largely  an  imitative  play-action 
following  the  direction  of  the  movements  of  another's  hand. 
Preyer  speaks  of  a  little  boy  who  in  his  second  year  was 
asked  when  scribbling  with  a  pencil  what  he  was  doing 
and  answered  '  writing  houses '.  He  was  apparently 
making  believe  that  his  jumble  of  lines  represented  houses.2 

1  E.  Cooke  gives  illustrations  of  these  in  his  thoughtful  and  inter- 
esting articles  on  "  Art-teaching  and  Child-nature,"  published  in  the 
Journal  of  Education,  Dec.,  1885,  and  Jan.,  1886. 

2  Preyer,  op.  cit.,  p.  47. 


334 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


Fig.  i  (a)  and 


Almost  any  scribble  may  in  this  earliest  stage  take  on  a 
meaning  through  the  play  of  a  vigorous  childish  imagination. 
The  same  play  of  imagination  is  noticeable  in  the  child's 
first  endeavours  to  draw  an  object 
from  memory  when  he  is  asked  to 
do  so.     Thus   a  little  girl  in  her 
fourth  year  referred  to  by  Mr.  E. 
Cooke  when  asked  to  draw  a  cat 
produced     a     longish     irregularly 
curved   line  crossed  by  a  number 
of  shorter  lines,  which  strange  pro- 
duction she  proceeded  quite  com- 
placently to  dignify  by  the  name 
'  cat,'  naming  the  whiskers,  legs,  and  tail  (Fig.  I  (a);  compare 
the  slightly  fuller  design  in  Fig.  I  (b]  ).1 

Here  it  is  evident  we  have  a  phase  of  childish  drawing 
which  is  closely  analogous  to  the  symbolism  of  language. 
The  representation  is  arbitrarily  chosen  as  a  symbol  and  not 
as  a  likeness.  This  element  of  a  non-imitative  or  symbolic 
mode  of  representation  will  be  found  to  run  through  the 
whole  of  childish  drawing. 

Even  this  chaotic  scribble  shows  almost  from  the 
beginning  germs  of  formative  elements,  not  merely  in  the 
fundamental  line-elements,  but  also  in  the  loops,  and  in  the 
more  abrupt  changes  of  direction  or  angles.  A  tendency 
to  draw  a  loop-like  rudimentary  contour  soon  emerges,  and 
thus  we  get  the  transition  to  a  possible  outlining  of  objects. 
Miss  Shinn  gives  a  good  example  of  an  ovoid  loop  drawn 
by  her  niece  in  her  hundred  and  ninth  week.2  With 
practice  the  child  acquires  by  the  second  or  third  year  the 
usual  stock  in  trade  of  the  juvenile  draughtsman,  and  can 
draw  a  sort  of  straight  line,  curved  lines,  a  roughish  kind 
of  circle  or  oval,  as  well  as  dots,  and  even  fit  lines  together 

1  Taken  from  E.  Cooke's  articles  already  quoted,  drawings  19  and 


2  Op.  cit.,  pt.  ii.,  p.  97;   "  fifty-sixth  week "  is,  she  informs  me, 
an  error  for  hundred  and  ninth  week. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  335 

at  angles.1  When  this  stage  is  reached  we  begin  to  see 
attempts  at  real  though  rude  likenesses  of  men,  horses  and 
so  forth.  These  early  essays  are  among  the  most  curious 
products  of  the  child-mind.  They  follow  standards  and 
methods  of  their  own  ;  they  are  apt  to  get  hardened  into  a 
fixed  conventional  manner  which  may  reappear  even  in 
mature  years.  They  exhibit  with  a  certain  range  of 
individual  difference  a  curious  uniformity,  and  they  have 
their  parallels  in  what  we  know  of  the  first  crude  designs 
of  the  untutored  savage. 

First  Drawings  of  the  Human  Figure. 

It  has  been  wittily  observed  by  an  Italian  writer  on 
children's  art  that  they  reverse  the  order  of  natural  creation 
in  beginning  instead  of  ending  with  man.2  It  may  be 
added  that  they  start  with  the  most  dignified  part  of  this 
crown  of  creation,  viz.,  the  human  head.  A  child's  first 
attempt  to  represent  a  man  proceeds,  so  far  as  I  have 
observed,  by  drawing  the  front  view  of  his  head.  This  he 
effects  by  means  of  a  clumsy  sort  of  circle  with  a  dot  or  two 
thrown  in  by  way  of  indicating  features  in  general.  A  couple 
of  lines  may  be  inserted  as  a  kind  of  support,  which  do  duty 
for  both  trunk  and  legs.  The  circular  or  ovoid  form  is,  I 
think,  by  far  the  most  common.  The  square  head  in  my 
collection  appears  only  very  occasionally  and  in  children 
at  school,  who  presumably  have  had  some  training  in 
drawing  horizontal  and  vertical  lines.  The  accompanying 

1  I  am  much  indebted  to  Mr.  Cooke  for  the  sight  of  a  series  of 
early  scribbles  of  his  little  girl.      C/.  Baldwin,  Mental  Development, 
chap,  v.,  where. some  good  examples  of  early  line-tracing  are  given. 
According  to  Baldwin  angles  or  zig-zag  come  early,  and  are  probably 
due  to  the  cramped,  jerky  mode  of  movement  at  this  early  stage. 
Preyer  seems  to  me  wrong  in  saying  that  children  cannot  manage 
a  circular  line  before  the  end  of  the  third  year  (op.  ctt.,  p.  47).     Most 
children  who  draw  at  all  manage  a  loop  or  closed  curved  line  before 
this  date. 

2  Corrado  Ricci,  UArte  del  Bambini  (1887),  p.  6. 


336 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


example  (Fig.  2)  is  the  work  of  a  Jamaica  girl   of  five, 

kindly  sent  me  by  her  teacher. 

f '   /         I  This  first  attempt  to  outline  the 

human  form  is,  no  doubt,  character- 
ised by  a  high  degree  of  arbitrary 
symbolism.  The  use  of  a  rude  form 
of  circle  to  set  forth  the  human  head 
reminds  one  of  the  employment  by 
living  savage  tribes  of  the  same  form 
as  the  symbol  of  a  house  (hut  ?),  a 
wreath,  and  so  forth.1  Yet  there  is 
a  measure  of  resemblance  even  in 
this  abstract  symbolism  :  the  circle 


Fig.  2. 


does  roughly  resemble  the  contour  of  the  head  :  as,  indeed, 
the  square  or  rectangle  may  be  said  less  obviously  to  do 
when  hair  and  whiskers  and  the  horizontal  line  of  the  hat 
break  the  curved  line. 

But  it  is  not  the  mere  contour  which  represents  the  face  : 

it  is  a  circle  picked  out  with  features.     These, 

*"  ^  however   vaguely  indicated,  are    an    integral 

O  v 

O  O      part  of  the  facial  scheme.     This  is  illustrated 

—  >  in    the   fact    that    among    the    drawings    by 

jsj  savages  and  others  collected  by  General  Pitt- 

r1  "'  i          Rivers,  one,  executed  by  an  adult  negro  of 
Z.         L         Uganda,    actually    omits    the    contour,    the 
human  head  being  represented  merely  by  an 
arrangement  of  dark  patches  and  circles  for 
eyes,  ears,  etc.  (Fig.  3).2 

Coming  now  to  the  mode  of  representing 
the   features,  we   find   at   an    early  stage    of 
this    schematic    delineation    an    attempt    to 
differentiate  and  individualise  features,  not  only  by  giving 


It! 


1 

,t 


Fig.  3- 


1  See  Von  Steinen,  op.  cit.,  p.  247. 

2  These  drawings,  of  the  highest  interest  to  the  student  of  child-art 
as  well  as  to  the  anthropologist,  are  to  be  seen  in  the  General's 
Museum  at  Farnham  (Dorset)  (yth  room). 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  337 

definite  position  but  by  a  rough  imitation  of  form.  Thus 
we  get  the  vertical  line  as  indicating  the  direction  of  the 
nose,  the  horizontal  line  that  of  the  mouth,  and  either 
a  rounded  dot  or  a  circular  line  as  representative  of  the 
curved  outline  of  the  eye — whether  that  of  the  iris,  of  the 
visible  part  of  the  eyeball,  or  of  the  orbital  cavity.  A 
precisely  similar  scheme  appears  in  the  drawings  of 
savages.1 

At  first  the  child  is  grandly  indifferent  to  complete- 
ness in  the  enumeration  of  features.  Even  'the  two 
eyes,  a  nose  and  a  mouth'  are  often  imperfectly  represented. 
Thus  when  dots  are  used  we  may  have  one  or  more 
specks  ranging,  according  to  M.  Perez,  up  to  five.2 
The  use  of  a  single  dot  for  facial  feature  in  general 
has  its  parallel  in  the  art  of  savage  tribes.3  It  is, 
however,  I  think,  most  common  to  introduce  three  dots 
in  a  triangular  arrangement,  presumably  for  eyes  and 
mouth, — a  device  again  which  reappears  in  the  art  of 
uncivilised  races.4  Even  when  the  young  draughtsman 
has  reached  the  stage  of  distinguishing  the  features  he 
may  be  quite  careless  about  number  and  completeness. 
Thus  a  feature  may  be  omitted  altogether.  This  funnily 
enough  happens  most  frequently  in  the  case  of  that  one 
which  seems  to  us  'grown-ups'  most  self-assertive  and 
most  resentful  of  indignity,  viz.,  the  nose.  These  moon- 
faces  with  two  eyes  and  a  mouth  are  very  common 
among  the  first  drawings  of  children.  The  mouth,  on 
the  other  hand,  is  much  less  frequently  omitted.  The 
same  thing  seems  to  hold  good  of  the  drawings  of 

1  Schoolcraft  has  a  good  example  of  this  facial  scheme  in  the 
drawing  of  a  man  shooting  (The  Indian  Tribes  of  the  United  States,  i., 
pi.  48). 

2  L'Art  et  la  Poesie  chez  V Enfant,  p.  186. 

3  For  an  illustration  see  Andree,  Eth.  Parallelen  und   Vergleiche, 
pi.  3,  fig.  19. 

4  See  for  an  example,  Schoolcraft,  iv.,  pi.  18. 

22 


338 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


savages.1  The  eyes  are  rarely  omitted.  The  single  dot 
may  perhaps  be  said  to  stand  for  '  eye '.  Some  draw- 
ings of  savages  have 
the  two  eyes  and  no 
other  feature,  as  in 
the  accompanying  ex- 
ample from  Andree, 
plate  3  (Fig.  4  (a) ). 
On  the  other  hand,  a 
child  will,  as  we  have 
seen,  sometimes  con- 
tent himself  with  one 
eye.  This  holds  good 

Fig.  4  (a).  //(!•  '"v  not    only    where    the 

dot  is  used  but  after 
something  like  an  eye-circle  is  introduced,  as  in  the 
accompanying  drawing  by  a  Jamaica  girl  of  seven  (Fig. 

In  these  first  attempts  to  sketch  out  a  face  we  miss  a 
sense  of  relative  position  and  of  proportion.  It  is  astonish- 
ing what  a  child  on  first  attempting  to  draw  a  human  or 
animal  form  can  do  in  the  way  of  dislocation  or  putting  things 
into  the  wrong  place.  The  little  girl  mentioned  by  E. 
Cooke  on  trying,  about  the  same  age,  to  draw  a  cat  from 
a  model  actually  put  the  circle  representing  the  eye 
outside  that  of  the  head.  With  this  may  be  compared 
the  drawings  of  Von  Steinen  and  other  Europeans 
made  by  his  Brazil  Indian  companions,  in  which  what 
was  distinctly  said  by  the  draughtsman  to  be  the  mous- 

1  According  to  Stanley  Hall  the  nose  comes  after  the  mouth. 
This  may  be  an  approximate  generalisation,  but  there  are  evidently 
exceptions  to  it.  On  the  practice  of  savage  draughtsmen  see  the 
illustrations  of  Australian  cave  drawings  in  Andree,  op.  cit.,  p.  159. 
Cf.  the  drawings  of  Brazilian  tribes,  plate  iii.,  15.  In  some  cases  there 
seems  a  preference  for  the  nose,  certain  of  the  Brazilian  drawings 
representing  facial  features  merely  by  a  vertical  stroke. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


339 


tache  was  in  more  than  one  instance  set  above  the  eyes 
(Fig.  4  (c}  ).  When  dots  are  in- 
serted in  the  linear  scheme  they 
are  apt  at  first  to  be  thrown  in 
anyhow.  The  two  eyes,  I  find, 
when  these  only  are  given,  may  be 
put  one  above  the  other  as  well  as 
one  by  the  side  of  the  other,  and 
both  arrangements  occur  in  the 
drawings  of  the  same  child.  And 
much  later  when  greater  attention 

to  position  is  observable  there  is  a     Fif>-  4.  (*)•— Moustache  = 

horizontal    line    above 
general  tendency  to  put  the  group        curve  of  cap. 

of  features  too  high  up,  i.e.,  to  make  the  forehead  or  brain 
region  too  small  in  proportion  to  the  chin  region  (cf.  above, 
Fig.  2,  p.  336).1 

The  want  of  proportion  is  still  more  plainly  seen  in 
the  treatment  of  the  several  features. 
The  eye,  as  already  remarked,  is  apt 
to  be  absurdly  large.  In  the  drawing 
of  Mr.  Cooke's  little  girl  mentioned 
above  it  is  actually  larger  than  the 
head  outside  which  it  lies.  This 
enlargement  continues  to  appear 
frequently  in  later  drawings,  more 
particularly  when  one  eye  only  is 
introduced,  as  in  the  accompanying 
drawing  by  a  boy  in  his  seventh  year  (Fig.  5  (a) ; 
cf.  above,  Fig.  4  (£)  ).  The  mouth  is  apt  to  be 
even  more  disproportionate,  the  child  appearing  to 
delight  in  making  this  appalling  feature  supreme, 
as  in  the  following  examples,  both  by  boys  of  five 

1  M.  Passy  calls  attention  to  this  in  his  interesting  note  on 
children's  drawings,  Revue  Philosophique,  1891,  p.  614  ff.  I  find 
however  that  though  the  error  is  a  common  one  it  is  not 
constant. 


Fig-  5  («)• 


340 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


(Fig.  5  (J)  and  (,)). 


Fig.  5 


The  ear,  when  it  is  added,  is  apt 
to  be  enormous,  and  gener- 
ally the  introduction  of  new 
details  as  ears,  hair,  hands,  is 
wont  to  be  emphasised  by 
an  exaggeration  of  their 
magnitude. 

Very  interesting  is  the 
gradual  artistic  evolution  of 
the  features.  Here,  as  in 
organic  evolution,  there  is  a 
process  of  specialisation,  the 


Fig.  5  (c). 

primordial  indefinite  form  taking  on  more  of  characteristic 
complexity.  In  the  case  of  the  eye,  for  example,  we 
may  often  trace  a  gradual  development,  the  dot  being 
displaced  by  a  small  circle  or  ovoid,  this  last  supplemented 
by  a  second  circle  outside  the  first,1  or  by  one  or  by 
two  arches,  the  former  placed  above,  the  latter  above 
and  below  the  circle.  The  form  remains  throughout 
an  abstract  outline  or  scheme,  there  being  no  attempt  to 
draw  even  the  lines — e.g.,  those  of  the  lid-margins — 
correctly,  or  to  indicate  differences  of  light  and  dark,  save 
in  the  case  where  a  central  black  dot  is  used.  In  this 
schematic  treatment  so  striking  and  interesting  a  feature  as 
the  eye-lash  only  very  rarely  finds  a  place.  A  similar 
schematic  treatment  of  the  eye  in  the  use  of  a  dot,  a  dot 
in  a  circle,  and  two  circles,  is  observable  in  the  drawings  of 
savages  and  of  Egyptian  and  other  archaic  art.2 

The  evolution  of  the  mouth  is  particularly  interesting. 
It  is  wont  to  begin  with  a  horizontal  line  (or  what  seems 
intended  for  such)  which  is  frequently  drawn  right  across 

1  In  one  case  I  find  the  curious  device  of  two  dots  or  small  circles, 
one  above  the  other  within  a  larger  circle,  and  this  form  repeated  in 
the  eye  of  animals. 

2  An  example  of  circle  withinrcircle  occurs  in  a  drawing  by  a  male 
Zulu  in  General  Pitt-Rivers'  collection. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


341 


the  facial  circle.  But  a  transition  soon  takes  place  to  a 
more  distinctive  representation.  This  is  naturally  enough 
carried  out  by  the  introduction  of  the  characteristic  and 
interesting  detail,  the  teeth.  This  may  be  done,  according 
to  M.  Perez,  by  keeping  to  the  linear  representation,  the 
teeth  being  indicated  by  dots  placed  upon  the  horizontal 
line.  In  all  the  cases  observed  by  me  the  teeth  are  intro- 
duced in  a  more  realistic  fashion  in  connexion  with  a  con- 
tour to  suggest  the  parted  lips.  The  contour — especially 
the  circular  or  ovoid — occasionally  appears  by  itself  without 
teeth,  but  the  teeth  seem  to  be  soon  added.  The 
commonest  forms  of  tooth-cavity  I  have  met  with  are  a 


Fig.  6  (a). 

Fig.  6  (fe).  pig.  6  (c). 

narrow  rectangular  and  a  curved  spindle-shaped  slit  with 
teeth  appearing  as  vertical  lines  (see  the  two  drawings  by 
boys  of  six  and  five,  Fig.  6  (a}  and  (£)).  These  two  fotms 
are  improved  upon  and  more  likeness  is  introduced  by 
making  the  dental  lines  shorter,  as  in  Fig.  5  (c)  (p.  340). 
With  this  may  be  compared  a  drawing  by  a  boy  of  five 
(Fig.  6  (c}\  where  however  we  see  a  movement  from 
realism  in  the  direction  of  a  freer  decorative  treatment. 

A  somewhat  similar  process  of  evolution  is  noticeable  in 
the  case  of  the  nose,  though  here  the  movement  is  soon 
brought  to  a  standstill.  Thus  the  vertical  line  gives  place 


342 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


to  an  angle,  which  may  point  to  the  side,  as  in  the  drawing 
of  a  country-boy  between  three  and  four  (Fig.  7  (a) ),  but 
more  frequently,  I  think,  points  upwards,  as  in  the  drawing 
of  a  boy  of  six  (Fig.  7  (b} ).  This  in  its  turn  leads  to  an 
isosceles  triangle  with  an  acute  angle  at  the  apex,  as  in  the 
drawing  of  a  boy  of  six  (Fig.  7  (c} ).  In  a  few  cases  a  long 
spindle-shaped  or  rectangular  form  similar  to  that  of  the 


Fig.  7  (6). 


Fig.  7  (c). 


Fig.  7  (a). 


\ 
Fig.  7  (d). 


Fig.  7 


mouth  is  employed,  as  in  a  drawing  of  a  nervous  child  of  six 
(Fig.  7  (*/)).  Refinements  are  introduced  now  and  again  by 
an  attempt  at  the  nostrils,  as  in  the  accompanying  curious 
drawing  by  a  seven-years-old  Jamaica  girl  (Fig.  7  (e)  ).x 


1  It  is  possible  that  in  this  drawing  the  two  short  lines  added  to- 
the  mouth  are  an  original  attempt  to  give  the  teeth. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


343 


The  introduction  of  other  features,  more  especially 
ears  and  hair,  must,  according  to  my  observations,  be 
looked  on  as  occasional  only,  and  as  a  mark  of  an 
advance  to  a  more  naturalistic  treatment.  Differences 
of  treatment  occur  here  too.  Thus  the  ears,  which 
are  apt  to  be  absurdly  large,  are  now  inserted  inside 
the  head  circle,  now  outside  it.  The  hair  appears 
now  as  a  dark  cap  of  horizontal  strokes,  now  as  a 
kind  of  stunted  fringe,  now  as  a  bundle  or  wisp 
on  one  side,  which  may 
either  fall  or  stand  on 
end  (see  above,  Fig.  7 
(d*),  and  the  accompany- 
ing drawing  by  a  girl  of 
nearly  four,  Fig.  8  («)). 
These  methods  of  repre- 
sentation are  occasion- 
ally varied  by  a  more 
elaborate  line-device,  as 
a  curly  looped  linesimilar 
to  that  employed  for 
smoke,  as  in  the  annexed 
drawing  by  a  girl  of  seven  (Fig.  8  (b) ). 

As  implied  in  this  account  of  the  facial  features,  a  good 
deal  of  convention-like  agreement  of  method  is  enlivened 
by  a  measure  of  diversity  of  treatment.  Perhaps  one  of 
the  most  striking  instances  of  daring  originality 
is  seen  in  the  attempt  by  a  girl  of  four — who 
was  subjected  to  a  great  deal  of  instruction — to 
give  separate  form  to  the  chin  (Fig.  9).  This 
may  be  compared  with  the  attempt  of  the 
Uganda  negro  to  indicate  symbolically  the 
cheeks  (see  above,  p.  336,  Fig.  3). 

As  I  have  remarked,  to  the  child  bent  on  representing 
'  man  '  the  head  or  face  is  at  first  the  principal  thing,  some 
early  drawings  contenting  themselves  with  this.  But  in 


Fig.  8  (b). 


Fig.  9. 


344 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


general   the   head  receives  some  support.      The  simplest 

device  here  is  the  abstract  mode  of  representation  by  two 

supporting  lines,  which  do  duty  for  legs  and  body.     These 

are  for  the  most  part  parallel  (see  above,  p.  336,  Fig.  2), 

though  occasionally  they  are  united  at  the  top,  making  a 

— ^     kind  of  target  figure.     This  same  arrange- 

I'.'J      ment,  fixing  the  head  on  two  upright  lines, 

~j  "|       meets  us  also  in  the  rude  designs  of  savages, 

J    L       as  may  be  seen  in  the  accompanying  rock 

Fig.  10.          inscription  from  Schoolcraft  (Fig.   lo).1 

The  comparative  indifference  of  the  child  to  the  body 

or  trunk  is  seen  in  the  obstinate  persistence  of  this  simple 

scheme  of  head  and  legs,  to  which  two  arms  attached  to 

the   sides   of  the  head    are   often   added.      A  child   will 

complete  the  drawing  of  the  head  by  inserting  hair  or  a 

cap,  and  will  even  add  feet 
and  hands,  before  he 
troubles  to  bring  in  the 
trunk  (see  above,  p.  336, 
Fig.  2,  and  p.  342,  Fig.  7 
(aT)y  also  the  accompanying 
drawing  by  a  boy  of  six, 
Fig.  1 1  (a} ).  With  this 
neglect  of  the  trunk  by 
children  may  be  compared 
the  omission  of  it — as  if  it 
were  a  forbidden  thing — 


Fig.  ii  (&). 


Fig.  ii  (a). 


Rivers'    drawings,    executed 


in 
by 


one   of 
a    Zulu 


General     Pitt- 
woman    (Fig. 


From  this  common  way  of  spiking  the  head  on  two 
forked  or  upright  legs  there  is  one  important  deviation. 
The  contour  of  the  head  may  be  left  incomplete,  and  the 
upper  occipital  part  of  the  curve  be  run  on  into  the  leg- 
lines,  as  in  the  accompanying  example  by  a  Jamaica  girl 


1  Op.  cit.,  pt.  iv.,  plate  18. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


345 


of  seven  (Fig.  12).     I  have  met  with  no  example  of  this 
among  English  children. 

The  drawing  of  the  trunk  may 
commence  in  one  of  two  ways. 
With  English  children  it  appears 
often  to  emerge  as  an  expansion 
or  prolongation  of  the  head-contour, 
as  in  the  accompanying  drawings 
of  the  front  and  side  view  (Fig. 
13  (a)  and  (b')}.1  Or,  in  the  second 
place,  the  leg-scheme  may  be  modi- 
fied, either  by  drawing  a  horizontal 
line  across  them  and  so  making  a 
rectangle,  as  in  the  accompany- 
ing drawing  by  a  boy  of  six,  or  by  shading  in  the 
upper  part  of  the  space,  as  in  the  other  figure  by  a  girl 
of  five  (Fig.  13  (c)  and  (d] ).  A  curious  and  interesting 


Fig.  12. 


Fig.  13  (&)• 


Fig.  13  (if)- 


Fig.  13  (a). 


Fig.  13 


variant  of  this  second  mode  of  introducing  the  trunk  is  to 
be  found  in  the  drawings  of  Von  Steinen's  Brazilians,  where 

'A  drawing  given  by  Andree,  op.  cit.,  plate  ii.,  n,  seems  to  me 
to  illustrate  a  somewhat  similar  attempt  to  develop  the  trunk  out  of 
the  head. 


346 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


the  leg-lines  are  either  kept  parallel  for  a  while  and  then 

made  to  diverge,  or  are  pinched 
in  below  what  may  be  called 
the  pelvis,  though  not  com- 
pletely joined  (Fig.  13  (e)  and 


Fig.  13  (e)  and  (/). 


When  the  trunk  is  distinctly 
marked  off,  it  is  apt  to  remain 
small  in  proportion  to  the 
head,  as  in  the  following  two 
drawings  by  boys  of  about  five  (Fig.  14  (a)  and  (£)). 
As  to  its  shape,  it  is  most  commonly  circular  or  ovoid 
like  the  head.  But  the  square  or  rectangular  form  is  also 
found,  and  in  the  case  of  certain  children  it  is  expressly 


Fig.  14  (c). 
Fig.  14  («). 

stated  that  this  came  later.  A  triangular  cape-like  form 
also  appears  now  and  again,  as  in  the  accompanying  draw- 
ing by  a  boy  of  six  (Fig.  14  (f)).1  The  treatment  of  the 
form  of  trunk  often  varies  in  the  drawings  of  the  same  child. 
At  this  stage  there  is  no  attempt  to  show  the  joining  on 
of  the  head  to  the  trunk  by  means  of  the  neck.  The  oval 
of  the  head  is  either  laid  on  the  top  of  that  of  the  trunk,  or 
more  commonly  cuts  off  the  upper  end  of  the  latter.  The 


1  The   opposite  arrangement   of  a  triangle  on   its  apex   occurs 
among  savage  drawings. 


THE   YOUNG  DRAUGHTSMAN. 


347 


neck,  when  first  added,  is  apt  to  take  the  exaggerated  look 
of  caricature.  It  may  be 
represented  by  a  single 
line,  by  a  couple  of  par- 
allel lines,  or  by  a  small 
oval  or  circle,  as  in  the 
accompanying  drawings 
by  a  girl  of  six  and  a 
boy  of  five  respectively 
(Fig.  15  (a)  and  (J) ; 
cf.  above,  p.  342,  Fig.  7 

(*)> 


Fig.  15  (&). 


It  is  noticeable  that  there  is  sometimes  a  double  body, 
two  oval  contours  being  laid  one  upon  the  other.  In  certain 
cases  this  looks 
very  like  an  ex- 
pansion of  the 
neck,  as  in  the 
accom  panying 
drawing  by  the 
same  boy  that  drew 
the  round  neck 
above  (Fig.  i6(«)). 
In  other  cases  the 
arrangeme 
plainly  does  not 
aim  at  different!-  Fig.  16  (6). 

ating  the  neck,  since  this  part  is  separately  dealt  with  (Fig. 
1 6  (£)).  Here  it  may  possibly  mean  a  crude  attempt  to 
indicate  the  division  of  the  trunk  at  the  waist,  as  brought 
out  especially  by  female  attire,  as  may  be  seen  in  the 
accompanying  drawing  where  the  dots  for  buttons  on  each 
oval  seem  to  show  that  the  body  is  signified  (Fig.  i6(c);  cf. 
above,  p.  342,  Fig.  7  (c)).1  This,  along  with  the  triangular 

1  On  the  other  hand  I  find  the  button  dots  sometimes  omitted  in 
the  lower  oval. 


Fig.  1 6  (c). 


348  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

cape-shape  of  the  trunk,  is  one  of  the  few  illustrations  of 
the  effect  of  dress  on  the  first  childish  treatment  of  the 
figure.  As  a  rule,  this  primitive  art  is  a  study  of  nature 
in  so  far  as  the  artificial  adjuncts  of  dress  are  ignored, 
and  the  rounded  forms  of  the  body  are,  though  crudely 
enough  no  doubt,  hinted  at. 

Coming  now  to  the  arms  we  find  that  their  introduction 
is  very  uncertain.  To  the  child,  as  also  to  the  savage, 
the  arms  are  what  the  Germans  call  a  Nebensache — side- 
matter  (i.e.,  figuratively  as  well  as  literally),  and  are  omitted 
in  rather  more  than  one  case  out  of  two.  After  all,  the 
divine  portion,  the  head,  can  be  supported  very  well 
without  their  help. 

The  arms,  as  well  as  the  legs,  being  the  thin  lanky  mem- 
bers, are  commonly  represented  by  lines. 
The  same  thing  is  noticeable  in  the  draw- 
ings of  savages.1  The  arms  appear  in  the 
front  view  of  the  figure  as  stretched  out 
horizontally,  or,  at  least,  reaching  out 
from  the  sides  ;  and  their  appearance 
always  gives  a  certain  liveliness  to  the 
figure,  an  air  of  joyous  self-proclamation, 
as  if  they  said  in  their  gesture-language, 
1  Here  I  am  '  (see  above,  p.  339,  Fig.  5 
(«),  and  the  accompanying  drawing  of  a 
Fig-  X7-  boy  of  six,  Fig.  17). 

In  respect  of  shape  and  structure  a  process  of  evolution 
may  be  observed.  In  certain  cases  the  abstract  linear 
representation  gives  place  to  contour,  the  arm  being  drawn 
of  a  certain  thickness.  But  I  find  that  the  linear  repre- 
sentation of  the  arm  often  persists  after  the  legs  have 
received  contour,  this  being  probably  another  illustration  of 
the  comparative  neglect  of  the  arm  ;  as  in  the  accompany- 


1  For  examples,  see  Andree,  op.  cit.,  plate  3.     Cf.  the  drawings  of 
Von  Steinen's  Brazilians. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


349 


ing  drawing  by  a  boy  of  five  (Fig.  18  (a)).  The  primal  rigid 
straightness  yields  later  on  to  the  freedom  of  an  organ.  Thus 
an  attempt  is  made  to  represent  by  means  of  a  curve  the  look 
of  the  bent  arm,  as  in  the  accompanying  drawings  by  boys 


Fig.  18  (a). 

Fig.  18  (c).-A 

miner. 
Fig.  18 

of  five  (Fig.  1 8  (b}  and  (*:)).  In  other  cases  the  angle  of  the 
elbow  is  indicated.  This  last  comes  comparatively  late  in 
children's  drawings,  which  here,  too,  lag  behind  the  crudest 
outline  sketches  of  savages. 

The  mode  of  insertion  or  attachment  of  the  arms  is 
noteworthy.  Where  they  are  added  to  the  trunkless  figure 
they  appear  as  emerging  either  from  the  sides  of  the  head, 
as  in  the  accompanying  drawing 
by  a  boy  of  two  and  a  half  years, 
or  from  the  point  of  junction  of 
the  head  and  legs  (Fig.  19 ;  cf. 
above,  p.  342,  Fig.  7  (d]  and 
(e)).  In  the  case  of  savage 

drawings    wanting    the    trunk 

c  is.  IQ. 
the  arm  is  also  inserted  at  this 

point  of  junction  (see  above,  pp.  344,  346,  Figs.  10  and 
13  (7))-1 

1  On  the  treatment  of  the  arm  in  the  drawings  of  savages,  see  in 
addition  to  the  authorities  already  mentioned  The  Annual  Report  of 
the  Bureau  of  Ethnology,  1883-4,  p.  42  ff. 


350 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


After  the  trunk  has  been  added,  the  mode  of  insertion 
varies  still  more.  In  a  not  inconsiderable  number  of  cases 
the  arms  spring  from  the  bottom  of  the  head-circle,  and 
sometimes  even  from  the  median  region,  as  before  the 
trunk  appeared  (cf.  above,  p.  346,  Fig.  14  (b)}.  In  the  last 
case  the  most  grotesque  arrangements  occur,  as  if  the  arms 
might  sprout  at  any  point  of  the  surface.1  In  the  majority 
of  cases,  however,  and  certainly  among  the  better  drawings, 
the  arms  spring  from  the  side  of  the  trunk  towards  the 
median  level  (cf,  above,  p.  341,  Fig.  6  (a)). 

The  length  of  the  arm  is  frequently  exaggerated.  This 
adds  to  the  self-expansive  and  self-proclamatory  look  of 
the  mannikin,  as  may  be  seen  in  the  accompanying 


Fig.  20  (a).  Fig-  20  (b). 

drawings  by  boys  of  five  and  of  six  respectively   (Fig. 
20  (a)  and  (£)). 

This  arrangement  of  the  arms  stretched  straight  out,  or 
less  commonly  pointing  obliquely  upwards  or  downwards, 
continues  until  the  child  grows  bold  enough  to  represent 
actions.  When  this  stage  is  reached  their  form  and  length 
may  be  materially  modified,  as  also  their  position.2 

1  The  tendency  which  appears  in  more  than  one  child's  drawings 
to  put  the  right  arm  below  the  left  is  worth  noting,  though  I  am  not 
prepared  to  offer  an  explanation  of  the  phenomenon. 

2  On  the  treatment  of  the  arm,   see   Perez,  op.  cit.,  p.    190:  cf. 
Ricci,  op.  cit.,  pp.  6-8.     I  have  met  with  no  case  of  the  arms  being 
attached   to   the  legs  such  as  Stanley  Hall  speaks  of,  Contents  of 
Children's  Minds,  p.  267. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


351 


The  arm  in  these  childish  drawings  early  develops  the 
interesting  adjunct  of  a  hand.  Like  other  features  this  is 
apt  at  first  to  be  amusingly  forced  into  prominence  by  its 
size,  and  not  infrequently  by  heaviness  of  stroke  as  well. 

The  treatment  of  the  hand  illustrates  the  process  of 
artistic  evolution,  the  movement  from  a  bold  symbolism  in 
the  direction  of  a  more  life-like  mode  of  representation. 
Thus  one  of  the  earliest  and  rudest  devices  I  have  met  with, 
though  in  a  few  cases  only,  is  that  of  drawing  strokes 
across  the  line  of  the  arm  by  way  of  digital  symbols.  Here 
we  have  merely  a 
clumsy  attempt  to 
convey  the  abstract 
idea  of  branching  or 
bifurcation.  These 
cross-strokes  are 
commonly  continued 
upwards  so  that  the 
whole  visible  part  of 


Fig.  21  (a).  —  Humpty 
Dumpty  on  the  wall. 


Fig.  21 


the      arm      becomes 

tree-like.       It    is    an 

important  step  from  this  to  the  drawing  of  twig-like  lines 

which  bifurcate  with  the  line  of  the  arm  (Fig.  21  (a)  and  (£)). 

It  is  a  still  more  significant  advance  in  the  process  of 
evolution  when  the  digital  bifurcations  are  placed  rightly, 
being  concentrated  in  a  bunch-like  arrangement  at  the 
extremity  of  the  arm-line.  Here,  again,  various  modes  of 
treatment  disclose  themselves,  marking  stages  in  the 
development  of  the  artist. 

The  simplest  device  would  seem  to  be  to  draw  one 
short  line  on  either  side  of  the  termination  of  the  arm-line 
so  as  to  produce  a  rude  kind  of  bird's  foot  form.  This  may 
be  done  clumsily  by  drawing  a  stroke  across  at  right  angles 
to  the  line  of  the  arm,  or  better  by  two  independent  strokes 
making  acute  angles  with  this  line.  These  two  modes  of 
delineation  manifestly  represent  a  restriction  of  the  two 


352  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

varieties  of  diffuse  or  dispersed  treatment  of  the  fingers 
already  illustrated.  Both  forms  occur  among  children's 
drawings.  They  may  be  found  among  the  drawings  of 
savages  as  well.1 

In  this  terminal  finger-arrangement  the  number  of 
finger-lines  varies  greatly,  being,  in  the  cases  observed  by 
me,  frequently  four  and  five,  and  sometimes  even  as  great  as 
ten.  It  varies,  too,  greatly  in  the  drawings  of  the  same 
child,  and  in  some  cases  even  in  the  two  hands  of  the  same 
figure,  showing  that  number  is  not  attended  to,  as  may  be 
seen  in  the  two  annexed  drawings,  both  by  boys  of  five 
(Fig.  22  (a)  and  (£)).  The  idea  seems  to  be  to  set  forth  a 

multiplicity  of  branch- 
ing fingers,  and  multi- 
plicity here  seems  to 
<^x  mean  three  or  more. 

J  I  The     same    way    of 

Tjj]  representing  the  hand 

/7.  bv   a    claw-form,    in 

T--  /    <.  rig.  22  (0).  J 

which  the  number  of 

fingers  is  three  or  more,  reappears  in  the  drawings  of 
savages  (cf.  above,  p.  339,  Fig.  4  (t)).2 

An  important  advance  on  these  crude  devices  is  seen 
where  an  attempt  is  made  to  indicate  the  hand  and  the 
relation  of  the  fingers  to  this.  One  of  the  earliest  of  these 
attempts  takes  the  form  of  the  well-known  toasting-fork  or 
rake  hand.  Here  a  line  at  right  angles  to  that  of  the 
arm  symbolically  represents  the  hand,  and  the  fingers 
are  set  forth  by  the  prongs  or  teeth  (see  above,  p.  341, 
Fig.  6  (a),  and  p.  349,  Fig.  18  («)).  Number  is  here 
as  little  attended  to  as  in  the  radial  arrangements.  It 

1  See  Andree's  collection,  op.  cit.,  ii.,  n. 

2  Examples    may    be    found    in    Catlin,    Schoolcraft,    Andree, 
Von  Steinen,  and  others,  also  in  the  drawings  in  the   Pitt- Rivers 
Museum,   Farnham.      Von    Steinen  gives   a   case    of  seven   finger- 
strokes. 


THE   YOUNG    DRAUGHTSMAN. 


353 


is  worth  noting  that  this  schema  seems  to  be  widely 
diffused  among  children  of  different  nationalities,  and 
occurs  in  the  drawings  of  untaught  adults.  I  have 
not,  however,  noticed  any  example  of  it  among  savage 
drawings. 

Another  way  of  bringing  in  the  hand  along  with  the 
fingers  is  by  drawing  a  dark  central  patch  or  knob.  This 
not  infrequently  occurs  without  the  fingers  as  the  symbol 
for  hand.  It  becomes  a  complete  symbol  by  arranging 
finger-lines  after  the  pattern  of  a  burr  about  this  (see  above, 

p.  347,  F'g-  IS  («))• 

A  further  process  of  artistic  evolution  occurs  when  the 
fingers  take  on 
contour.  This 
gives  a  look  of 
branching  leaves 
to  the  hand.  The 
leaf-like  pattern 
may  be  varied  in 
different  ways, 
among  others  by 
taking  on  a  floral 
aspect  of  petal- 
like  fingers  about  ^^  Fig" 23  (b)' 

"V  f    \ 

a  centre,  as  in  the 

two  annexed  drawings  by  boys  of  six  (Fig.  23  (a)  and 

(b}  ;  cf.  above,  p.  350,  Fig.  20  («)). 

One  curious  arrangement  by  which  a  thickened  arm 
is  made  to  expand  into  something  like  a  fan-shaped 
hand  appears  with  considerable  frequency.  It  is 
zoologically  interesting  as  being  a  kind  of  rough  re- 
presentation of  the  fundamental  typical  form  from  which 
hand,  fin,  and  wing  may  be  supposed  to  have  been 
evolved.  Here  the  arm  sinks  into  insignificance, 
the  whole  limb  taking  on  the  aspect  of  a  prolonged 
hand,  save  where  the  artist  resorts  to  the  device  of 

23 


354 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


making  the  double  organ  go  across  the  body  (Fig.  24  (#) 

and  (£)). 

f      \  The  legs  come 

in  for  very  much 
the  same  variety 
of  treatment  as 
the  arms.  The 
abstract  straight 
line  here,  as  al- 
ready pointed 
Fig.  24  (a).  Fig.  24  (b). 

out,    soon    gives 

place  to  the  pair  of  lines  representing  thickness.  They  are 
for  the  most  part  parallel  and  drawn  at  some  distance  one 
from  the  other,  though  in  certain  cases  there  is  a  slight 
tendency  to  give  to  the  figure  the  look  of  the  '  forked  biped  ' 
(cf.  above,  p.  342,  Fig.  7  (<:)).  In  a  large  proportion  of  cases 
there  is  a  marked  inclination  of  the  legs,  as  indeed  of  the 
whole  figure,  which  seems  to  be  falling  backwards  (see 
above,  pp.  340,  352,  Figs.  5  (c]  and  22  (b)).  In  many 
instances,  in  front  and  profile  view  alike,  one  of  the  legs 
is  drawn  under  the  body,  leaving  no  room  for  the  second, 
which  is  consequently  pushed  behind,  and  takes  on  the 
look  of  a  tail  (see  above,  p.  352,  Fig.  22  (£)). 

Both  legs  are  regularly  shown  alike  in  front  and  in 
profile  view.  Yet  even  in  this  simple  case 
attention  to  number  may  sometimes  lapse. 
Among  the  drawings  collected  by  me  is 
one  by  a  boy  of  five  representing  the 
monster,  a  three-legged  'biped'  (Fig.  25).1 
The  shape  of  the  leg  varies  greatly. 
With  some  children  it  is  made  short  and 
fat.  It  develops  a  certain  amount  of 
curvature  long  before  it  develops  a  knee- 
bend.  This  is  just  what  we  should  expect. 
The  standing  figure  needs  straight  or 
1  Unless  this  is  a  jocose  suggestion  of  a  tail. 


Fig.  25. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


355 


approximately  straight  legs  as  its  support.  When  the 
knee-bend  is  introduced  it  is  very  apt  to  be  exaggerated 
(cf.  above,  Fig.  24  (£)).  This  becomes  still  more  noticeable 
at  a  later  stage,  where  actions,  as  running,  are  attempted. 

The  treatment  of  the  foot  shows  a  process  of  evolution 
similar  to  that  seen  in  the  treatment  of  the  hand.  At  first 
a  bald  abstract  indication  or  suggestion  is  noticeable,  as 
where  a  short  line  is  drawn  across  the  extremity  of  the  leg. 
In  place  of  this  a  contour-form,  more  especially  a  circle 
or  knob,  may  be  used  as  a  designation.  Very  interesting 
here  is  the  differentiation  of  treatment  according  as  the 
booted  or  naked  foot  is  represented.  Children  brought  up 
in  a  civilised  community  like  England,  though  they  some- 
times give  the  naked  foot  (see  p.  342,  Fig.  7  (d),  where  the 
claw  pattern  is  adopted),  are  naturally  more  disposed  to 
envisage  the  foot  under  its  boot-form.  Among  the  drawings 
of  the  Jamaica  children,  presumably  more  familiar  with  the 
form  of  the  naked  foot,  I  find  both  the  toasting-fork  and 
the  burr  arrangement,  as  also  a  rude  claw,  or  birch-like  de- 
vice used  for  the  foot  (see  above,  pp.  336,  338,  345,  Figs. 
2,  4  (b\  and  12).  The  toasting-fork  arrangement  appears 
in  General  Pitt-Rivers'  collection  of  savage  drawings.  Also 
a  bird's  foot  treatment  often  accom- 
panies a  similar  treatment  of  the  hand 
in  the  pictographs  of  savage  tribes,  and 
in  the  drawings  of  Von  Steinen's 
Brazilians  (see  above,  pp.  338,  339,  Fig. 
4  (a}  and  (<:)). 

An  attempt  to  represent  the  booted 
foot  seems  to  be  recognisable  in  the 
early  use  of  a  triangular  form,  as  in  the 
accompanying  drawing  by  a  small 
artist  of  five  (Fig.  26  (a)}.1  Very  curious 
is  the  way  in  which  the  child  seeks  to 


Fig.  26  (a). 


1  This  is  hardly  conclusive,  as  I  find  the  triangular  form  used  for 
the  foot  of  a  quadruped,  presumably  a  horse. 


356 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


indicate  the  capital  feature  of  the  boot,  the  division  of 

toe  and  heel.  This  is  very 
frequently  done  by  continuing 
the  line  of  the  leg  so  as  to 
make  a  single  or  a  double  loop- 
pattern,  as  in  the  following 
(Fig.  26  (b\  (e) ;  cf.  above,  p.  342, 
Fig-  7  ($)}.  A  tendency  to  a 
more  restrained  and  naturalistic 
treatment  is  sometimes  seen 
(see  above,  p.  354,  Fig.  24  (a) 
and  (by}.  It  may  be  added  that 
the  notch  between  toe  and  heel 
is  almost  always  exaggerated. 

This  may  be  seen  by  a  glance  at  Figs.  17  and  22  (a),  pp. 

348,  352.     The  same  thing  is  noticeable  in  a  drawing  by 

a  young  Zulu  in  General  Pitt-Rivers'  collection. 


Fig.  26  (b). 


Fig.  26  (c). 


Front  and  Side   View  of  Human  Figure. 

So  far,  I  have  dealt  only  with  the  treatment  of  the  front 
view  of  the  human  face  and  figure.  New  and  highly  curi- 
ous characteristics  come  into  view  when  the  child  attempts 
to  give  the  profile  aspect.  This  comes  considerably  later 
than  the  early  lunar  representation  of  the  full  face. 

Children  still  more  than  adults  are  interested  in  the  full 
face  with  its  two  flashing  and  fascinating  eyes.  '  If,'  writes 
a  lady  teacher  of  considerable  experience  in  the  Kinder- 
garten, '  one  makes  drawings  in  profile  for  quite  little  chil- 
dren, they  will  not  be  satisfied  unless  they  see  two  eyes  ;  and 
sometimes  they  turn  a  picture  round  to  see  the  other  side.' 
This  reminds  one  of  a  story  told  by  Catlin  of  the  Indian 
chief,  who  was  so  angry  at  a  representation  of  himself  in 
profile  that  the  unfortunate  artist  was  in  fear  of  his  life. 

At  the  same  time  children  do  not  rest  content  with  this 
front  view.  There  is,  I  believe,  ample  reason  to  say  that,. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  357 

quite  apart  from  teaching,  they  find  their  own  way  to  a  new 
mode  of  representing  the  face  and  figure  which,  though  it 
would  be  an  error  to  call  it  a  profile  drawing,  has  some  of 
the  characteristics  of  what  we  understand  by  this  expres- 
sion. 

The  first  clear  indication  of  an  attempt  to  give  the 
profile  aspect  of  the  face  is  the  introduction  of  the  angular 
line  of  the  side  view  of  the  nose  into  the  contour.  The 
little  observer  is  soon  impressed  by  the  characteristic, 
well-marked  outline  of  the  nose  in  profile  ;  and  as  he 
cannot  make  much  of  the  front  view  of  the  organ, 
he  naturally  begins  at  an  early  stage,  certainly  by  the 
fifth  year,  to  vary  the  scheme  of  the  lunar  circle,  broken 
at  most  by  the  ears,  by  a  projection  answering  to  a  profile 
nose. 

This  change  is  sometimes  made  without  any  other,  so 
that  we  get  what  has  been  called  the  mixed 
scheme,  in  which  the  eyes  and  mouth  retain 
their  front-view  aspect.  This  I  find  very 
•common  among  children  of  five.  It  may  be 
found — even  in  the  trunkless  figure — along 
with  a  linear  mouth  (see  above,  pp.  340-344, 
Figs.  5  (r)  and  following,  also  n  («)).  The 
nasal  line  is,  needless  to  say,  treated  with 
great  freedom.  There  is  commonly  a  good  p.  '  " 

deal    of  exaggeration   of  size.      In  certain 
cases  the  nose  is  added  in  the  form  of  a  spindle  to  the 
completed  circle  (Fig.  27  ;  cf.  above,  p.  340,  Fig.  5  (*:)). 

It  may  well  seem  a  puzzle  to  us  how  a  normal  child  of 
five  or  six  can  complacently  set  down  this  irrational  and 
inconsistent  scheme  of  a  human  head.  We  must  see  what 
can  be  said  by  way  of  explanation  later  on.  It  is  to  be 
noticed,  further,  that  in  certain  cases  the  self-contradiction 
goes  to  the  point  of  doubling  the  nose.  That  is  to  say, 
although  the  interesting  new  feature,  the  profile  nose,  is 
introduced,  earlier  habit  asserts  itself  so  that  the  vertical 


358 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


nasal  line  appears  between  the  two  eyes  (see  above,  p.  349, 
Fig.  18  (*)). 

The  further  process  of  differentiation  of  the  profile  from 
the  primitive  full-face  scheme  is  effected  in  part  by  adding 
other  features  than  the  nose  to  the  contour.  Thus  a  notch 
for  the  mouth  appears  in  some  cases  below  the  nasal  pro- 
jection (Fig.  28  (a)),  though  the  grinning  front  view  is  apt 

to  hold  its  own  perti- 
naciously. A  beard, 
especially  the  short 
'  imperial,'  as  it  used 
to  be  called,  shooting 
out  like  the  nose 
from  the  side,  also 
helps  to  mark  profile.1 
Less  frequently  an 
ear,  and  in  a  very 
few  cases,  hair,  are 
added  on  the  hinder- 
side  of  the  head,  and 
assist  the  impression 
of  profile.  Adjuncts,  especially  the  pipe,  and  sometimes 
the  peak  of  the  cap,  contribute  to  the  effect,  as  in  the 
accompanying  drawing  by  a  boy  of  six  (Fig.  28  (b)  ;  cf. 
above,  Figs.  6  (a),  18  (c),  and  24  (b\  pp.  341,  349,  354).2 

At  the  same  time  the  front  features  themselves  undergo 
modification.  The  big  grinning  mouth  is  dropped  and  one 
of  the  eyes  omitted.  The  exact  way  in  which  this  occurs 
appears  to  vary  with  different  children.  In  certain  cases 
it  is  clear  that  the  front  view  of  the  mouth  cavity  disappears, 
giving  place  to  a  rough  attempt  to  render  a  side  view, 
before  the  second  eye  is  expunged ;  and  in  one  case  I  have 

1  I  take  the  long  line  in  Fig.  27  to  represent  the  manly  beard. 

2  In  rare  cases  the  pipe  sticks  out  from  the  side  of  what  is  clearly 
the  primitive  full  face.     Schoolcraft  gives  an  example  of  this,  too,  in 
Indian  drawing,  op.  cit.,  pt.  ii.,  pi.  41. 


Fig.  28  (a). 


Fig.  28  (b). 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


359 


detected  a  survival  of  the  two  eyes  in  what  otherwise  would  be 
a  consistent  profile  drawing  of  head  and  figure  (Fig.  29  (a) ; 
cf.  above,  p.  349,  Fig.  18  (b) ).  This  late  survival  of  the  two 
eyes  agrees  with  the  results  of  observation  on  the  drawings  of 
the  uncultured  adult.  One  of  General  Pitt-Rivers'  African 
boys  inserted  the  two  eyes  in  a  profile  drawing.  Von 
Steinen's  Brazilians  drew  by  preference  the  full  face,  so 
that  we  cannot  well  judge  as  to  how  they  would  have 
treated  the  profile.  Yet  it  is  curious  to  note  that  in 
what  is  clearly  a  drawing  of  a  side  view  of  a  fish  one  of 
these  Brazilians  introduces  both  eyes  (Fig.  29  (b} ).  The 
insertion  of  two  eyes  is  said  by  some  never  to  occur  in  the 


Fig.  29  (b). 


Fig.  29  (a). 

drawings  of  savages  on  stone,  hide,  etc.1  But  I  have  come 
across  what  seems  to  me  a  clear  example  of  it,  and  this  in 
a  fairly  good  sketch  of  a  profile  view  of  the  human  figure 
on  an  Indian  vase  (Fig.  29  (c)).2  Yet  this  late  retention  of 
the  two  eyes  in  profile,  though  the  general  rule  in  children's 
drawings,  is  liable  to  exceptions.  Thus  I  have  found  a 
child  retaining  the  big  front  view  of  the  mouth  along  with 
a  single  eye. 

It  may  be  added  that  children  at  a   particular  stage 


1  Ricci's  remarks  seem  to  me  to  come  to  this,  op.  cit.,  p.  25. 

2  From  The  Annual  Report  of  the  Bureau  of  Ethnology,  1880- 1,  p. 


406. 


3<5o 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


show  a  preference  for  some  one  arrangement ;  for  example, 
the  profile  nose  and  mouth,  and  the  two  front- view  eyes, 
which  tends  to  become  the  habitual  form  used,  though  a 
certain  amount  of  variation  is  observable.  The  differences 
noticeable  among  different  children's  drawings  suggest 
that  all  of  them  do  not  go  through  the  same  stages.  Thus 
some  may  pass  by  the  two-eyed  profile  stage  altogether,  or 
very  soon  rise  above  it,  whereas  others  may  linger  in  it.1 
One  notices,  too,  curious  divergences  with  respect  to 
the  mixture  of  incompatible  features. 
Differences  in  the  degree  of  intelligence 
show  themselves  here  also.  Thus  in  one 
case  a  child,  throughout  whose  drawings 
a  certain  feeble-mindedness  seems  to  betray 
itself,  actually  went  so  far  as  to  introduce 
the  double  nose  without  having  the  excuse 
of  the  two  eyes  (Fig.  30).  In  such  odd 
ways  do  the  tricks  of  habit  assert  them- 
selves. 

Fig.  30.  The  difficulty  which  the  child  feels  in 

these  profile  representations  is  seen  in  the  odd  positions 
given  to  the  eyes.  •  These  are  apt  to  be 
pushed  very  high  up,  to  be  placed  one 
above  the  other,  and,  what  is  more  signifi- 
cant, to  be  put  far  apart  and  close  to  the 
line  of  contour  (see  above,  Fig.  29  («)).  In 
the  following  drawing  by  a  boy  of  five  one 
of  the  eyes  may  be  said  to  be  on  this  line 
(Fig.  31  (a)}.  In  General  Pitt-Rivers'  col- 
lection we  find  a  still  more  striking  instance 
of  this  in  a  drawing  by  a  boy  of  eleven, 
the  second  eye  appearing  to  be  intentionally 
Fig-  31  («)•  put  outside  the  contour,  as  if  to  suggest  that 

1  Ricci  says  that  seventy  per  cent,  insert  two  eyes  in  their  first 
profile  drawings  (op.  cit.,  p.  17).  But  this  seems  a  rather  loose  state- 
ment. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  361 

we  must  look  round  to  the  other  side  of  the  facial  disc  in 

order  to  see  it  (Fig.  3 1  (£)).    Curious  variations 

of  treatment  appear,  as  in  inserting  two  eyes 

between  the  same  pair  of  curves  as  in  Fig. 

20  (b),  p.  350,  and  in  enclosing  two  pairs  of 

dots  or  small    circles   in    two    larger   circles 

as  in  Figs.   14  (b\  and  22  (<z),  pp.  346,  352 

(both  by  the  same  boy).1 

It  may  be  added  that  even  when  only  one 
eye  is  drawn,  a  reminiscence  of  the  anterior 
view  is  seen  in  its  form.  It  is  the  round  or 
spindle-shaped  contour  of  the  eye  as  seen  in 
front.  That  is  to  say  the  eye  of  the  profile  like  that  of  the  full 
facelooks  directlyat  the  spectator,so  that  in  amanner  theone- 
eyed  profile  is  a  front  view  (see  for  an  example,  Fig.  5  («),  p. 
339).  The  designs  of  savages,  and  the  archaic  art  of  civilised 
races,  including  a  people  so  high  up  as  the  Egyptians,  share 
this  tendency  of  children's  drawings  of  the  profile,  though  we 
find  scarcely  a  trace  of  the  tendency  to  insert  both  eyes. 

A  like  confusion  or  want  of  differentiation  shows  itself 
in  the  management  of  other  features  in  the  profile  view. 
As  observed,  a  good  large -ear  at  the  back  sometimes  helps 
to  indicate  the  side  view  (see  above,  p.  341,  Fig.  6  (a)). 
But  the  wish  to  bring  in  all  the  features,  seen  in  the  obstinate 
retention  of  the  two  eyes,  shows  itself  also  in  respect  of  the 
ears.  Thus  one  occasionally  finds  the  two  ears  as  in  the  front 
view  (see  above,  p.  346,  Fig.  14  (a),  where  the  aspect  is  clearly 
more  front  view  than  profile),  and  sometimes,  according  to 
M.  Passy — as  if  the  profile  nose  interfered  with  this  arrange- 
ment— both  placed  together  on  one  side.  The  treatment  of 
the  moustache  when  this  is  introduced  follows  that  of  the 
mouth.  So  imposing  a  feature  must  be  given  in  all  the 
glory  of  the  front  view  (see  above,  p.  350,  Fig.  20  (£)). 

Other  curious  features  of  this  early  crude  attempt  to 

1  I  assume  that  these  are  intended  for  two  eyes ;  but  the  scheme 
is  not  easy  to  interpret. 


362 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


Fig.  32. 


deal  with  the  profile  show  themselves  in  the  handling  of 
the  trunk  and  the  limbs.  I  have  met  with 
only  one  or  two  instances  of  a  profile  head 
appearing  before  the  addition  of  the  trunk 
as  in  Fig.  28  (a)  (p.  358).  In  the  large 
majority  of  cases  the  trunk  appears  and 
retains  the  circular  or  oval  form  of  the 
primitive  front  view.  When,  as  very  fre- 
quently happens,  the  interesting  vertical  row 
of  buttons  is  added  it  is  apt  to  be  inserted 
in  the  middle,  giving  a  still  more  definitely 
frontal  aspect.  The  juxtaposition  of  this 
with  the  head  turned  to  the  left  need  cause 
no  difficulty  to  the  little  draughtsman,  after 
what  he  has  comfortably  swallowed  in  the 
shape  of  incompatibilities  in  the  face  itself 
(see  above,  p.  347,  Fig.  15  ($)).  In  rare  cases,  however,  one 
may  light  on  a  distinctly  lateral  treatment  of  the  buttons. 
In  one  instance  I  have  found  it  in  a  drawing  which  would  be 
a  consistent  profile  but  for  the  insertion  of  the  second  eye, 
and  the  frontal  treatment  of  the  legs  and  feet  (Fig.  32). 

In  the  arrangement  of  the  arms  there  is  more  room 
for  confusion.  The  management  of  these  in  the  profile 
view  naturally  gives  difficulty  to  the  little  artist,  and  in 
some  cases  we  find  him  shirking  the  point  by  retaining  the 

front  view  or  spread-eagle 
arrangement.  This  occurs 
as  a  rule  where  the  profile 
modification  is  limited  to  the 
introduction  of  a  lateral  nose 
or  nose  and  pipe  (see,  e.g., 
Figs.  24  (a)  and  28  (b\  pp. 
354,  358).  What  is  more 
surprising  is  that  it  appears  in 
Fig.  33.  rare  cases  in  drawings  which 

otherwise  would  be  fairly  consistent  profile  sketches.  [Fig.  33  ; 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


363 


all  this  child's  completed  drawings,  four  in  number,  adopt 
the  same  front-view  scheme  of  arms.] 

The  view  of  the  profile  with  both  arms  stretched  out  in 
front  seems,  however,  early  to  impress  itself  on  the  child's 
imagination,  and  an  attempt  is  made  to  introduce  this 
striking  arrangement.  The  addition  of  the  forward-reach- 
ing arms  helps  greatly  to  give  a  profile  aspect  to  the  figure 
(see  above,  p.  349,  Fig.  18  (b) ). 

The  addition  of  the  forward-reaching  arms  is  carried 
out  more  especially  when  it  is 
desired  to  represent  an  action, 
as  in  the  drawing  given  above, 
p.  342,  Fig.  7  (c),  by  a  boy  of 
six,  which  represents  a  nurse 
apparently  walking  behind  a 
child,  and  in  the  accompanying 
figure,  by  a  boy  of  eight  and 

a  half,  of  an   Irishman   knocking  a  man's  head  inside  a 
tent  (Fig.  34). 

The  crudest  mode  of  representing  the  side  view  of  the 
for  ward -reaching 
arms  is  by  drawing 
the  lines  from  the 
contour,  as  in  Fig. 
35  (a).  Difficulties 
arise  when  the  lines 
are  carried  across 
the  trunk.  Very 
often  both  arms  are 
drawn  in  this  way, 
as  in  Fig.  35  (b). 
There  is  a  certain 


Fig-  35  («)• 


Fig.  35 

analogy  here  to  the  insertion  of  the  two  eyes  in  the  profile 
representation,  a  second  feature  being  in  each  case  added 
which  in  the  original  object  is  hidden.1 

1  According  to   Ricci   the   second  arm   is  supposed  to    be   seen 
through  the  body. 


364 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


When  the  two  arms  are  thus  introduced  their  position 
varies  greatly,  whether  they  start  from  the  contour  or  are 
drawn  across  the  body.  That  is  to  say,  they  may  be  far 
one  from  the  other  (as  in  Fig.  35  (£)), 
or  may  be  drawn  close  together.  And 
again  the  point  of  common  origin  may  be 
high  up  at  the  meeting  point  of  trunk  and 
chin,  as  in  a  drawing  by  a  boy  of  five  (Fig. 
36),  or  at  almost  any  point  below  this. 

In  the  cases  I  have  examined  the 
insertion  of  both  arms  in  profile  repre- 
sentations is  exceptional.  More  frequent- 
ly, even  when  action  is  described,  one 
arm  only  is  introduced,  which  may  set 
out  from  the  anterior  surface  of  the  trunk, 
or,  as  we  have  seen,  start  from  the  posterior  surface  and  cross 
the  trunk  (see  above,  pp.  353,  356,  Figs.  23  (a)  and  26  (<:)). 
In  most  cases  where  no  action  such  as  walking  and  holding 
a  cane  is  signified  both  arms  are  omitted.  The  uncertainty 
of  the  arms  is  hardly  less  here  than  in  the  front  view. 

With  respect  to  the  legs,  we  find,  as  in  the  primitive 
frontal  view,  an  insertion  of  both.  An  ordinary  child  can 
still  less  represent  a  human  figure  in  profile  with  only  one 
leg  showing  than  he  can  represent  it  with  only  one  eye. 
As  a  rule,  so  long  as  he  is  guided  by  his  own  inner  light 
only  he  does  not  attempt  to  draw  one  leg  over  and  partially 
covering  the  other,  but  sets  them  both  out  distinctly  at  a 
respectful  distance  one  from  the  other.  The  refinement  of 
making  the  second  foot  or  calf  and  foot  peep  out  from 
behind  the  first,  as  in  Fig.  29  (a)  (p.  359),  and  possibly  also 
Fig.  1 8  (c)  (p.  349),  shows  either  an  exceptional  artistic  eye, 
or  the  interference  of  the  preceptor. 

The  treatment  of  the  feet  by  the  childish  pencil  is 
interesting.  It  is  presumable  that  at  first  no  difference 
of  profile  and  front  view  attaches  to  the  position  of  the 
foot.  It  has  to  be  shown,  and  as  the  young  artist  knows 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


365 


nothing  of  perspective  and  foreshortening,  and,  moreover, 
would  not  be  satisfied  with  that  mode  of  delineation  if 
he  could  accomplish  it,  he  proceeds  naturally  enough  to 
draw  the  member  as  a  line  at  right  angles  to  that  of  the  leg. 
This  is  done  in  one  of  two  ways,  in  opposed  directions 
outwards,  or  in  the  same  direction,  answering  to  what  we 
should  call  the  front  or  the  side  view.  At  first,  I  believe, 
no  significance  of  front  and  side  view  is  attached  to  these 
arrangements.  Thus  in  some  sketches  by  a  little  girl  of 
four  and  a  half  I  find  the  primitive  front  view  of  the  head 
combined  with  each  of  these  arrangements  of  the  foot. 
In  drawings,  too,  of  older  children  of  six  and  upwards  I 
have  met  with  cases  both  of  a  profile 
representation  of  head  and  trunk  with 
spread-eagle  feet,  as  also  of  a  side  view 
of  the  feet  with  a  front  face  (see  Figs. 
5  0)  and  13  (c\  pp.  339,  345).  This 
last  arrangement,  I  find,  appears  in  a 
profile  treatment  .of  the  whole  leg  and 
foot  among  the  drawings  of  North 
American  Indians  (Fig.  37);  and  this 
suggests  that  the  side  view  in  which  the 
two  feet  point  one  way  is  more  easily  reached  and  fixed  by 
the  untutored  draughtsman. 

A  regular  and  apparently  intelligent 
addition  of  the  side  view  of  the  feet  to  the 
child's  crude  profile  drawing  of  the  human 
figure  produces  a  noticeable  increase  of 
definiteness.  One  common  arrangement, 
I  find,  in  the  handling  of  the  profile  is  the 
combination  of  the  side  view  of  the  feet 
with  a  more  or  less  consistent  profile  view 
of  the  head,  while  the  bust  is  drawn  in 
front  view  (see  above,  Figs.  35  (a),  36).  The 
effect  is  of  course  greater  where  the  side 
view  of  the  bent  leg  is  added  (see  Fig.  38  and  compare  with 


37- 


366  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

this  Fig.  37).  I  find  a  liking  for  this  same  arrangement  in 
the  drawings  of  the  unskilled  adult.  An  example  may  be 
seen  in  a  drawing  by  an  English  carpenter  in  General  Pitt- 
Rivers'  Museum  at  Farnham.  In  the  pictographs  of  the 
North  American  Indians  we  meet  with  cases  of  a  similar 
treatment.1  In  the  drawings  on  the  Egyptian  Mummy 
cases  in  the  British  Museum  instances  of  a  precisely  similar 
treatment  are  to  be  found.  We  seem  to  have  here  a  sort 
of  transition  from  the  first  crude  impossible  conception  to 
a  more  naturalistic  and  truthful  conception.  This  twist  of 
the  trunk  does  not  shock  the  eye  with  an  absolutely  im- 
possible posture,  as  the  early  artistic  solecisms  shock  it,  and 
it  is  an  arrangement  which  displays  much  that  is  character- 
istic and  valuable  in  the  human  form.'2 

One  point  to  be  noticed  among  these  drawings  of  the 
profile  by  children  is  that  in  a  large  majority  of  cases  the 
figure  looks  to  the  left  of  the  spectator.  In  the  drawings 
which  I  have  examined  this  appears  like  a  rule  to  which 
there  is  scarcely  any  exception,  save  where  the  child 
wants  to  make  two  figures  face  one  another  in  order  to 
represent  a  fight  or  the  less  sensational  incident  of  a  salute. 
The  way  in  which  the  new  direction  of  the  figure  is  given 
in  these  cases  shows  that  children  are  not  absolutely  shut 
up  to  the  one  mode  of  representation  by  any  insuperable 
difficulty.  There  is  a  like  tendency  observable  in  the  treat- 
ment of  the  quadruped,  which  nearly  always  looks  to  the 
left.  It  may  be  added  that  a  similar  habit  prevails  in  the 
drawings  of  untutored  adults,  as  the  pictographs  of  the 
North  American  Indians.  The  explanation  of  this,  as  well  as 
of  other  generalisations  here  reached,  will  be  touched  on 
later. 

I  conceive,  then,  that  there  reveals  itself  in  children's 

1  Annual  Report  of  Bureau  of  Ethnology,  1882-3,  P-  J6o. 

-  Professor  Petrie  has  pointed  out  to  me  that  the  Egyptian  of 
to-day  with  his  more  supple  body  easily  throws  himself  into  this 
position. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  367 

drawings  of  the  human  figure  between  the  ages  of  three  or 
four  and  eight  a  process  of  development  involving  differen- 
tiation and  specialisation.  This  process,  instead  of  leading 
to  a  fuller  and  more  detailed  treatment  of  the  front  view, 
moves  in  the  direction  of  a  new  and  quasi-profile  represen- 
tation, although  few  children  arrive  at  a  clear  and  consistent 
profile  scheme.  Different  children  appear  to  find  their  way 
to  different  modifications  of  a  mixed  front  and  side  view, 
some  amazingly  raw,  others  less  so  according  to  the  degree 
of  natural  intelligence,  and  probably  also  the  amount  of 
good  example  put  in  their  way  by  drawings  in  books,  and 
still  more  by  model-drawings  of  mother  or  other  instructor. 
I  have  met  with  only  a  few  examples  of  a  contem- 
poraneous and  discriminative  use  of  front  view  and  profile. 
Here  and  there,  it  is  true,  one  may  light  on  a  case  of  the 
old  lunar  scheme  surviving  side  by  side  with  the  commoner 
mixed  scheme  ;  but  this  sporadic  survival  of  an  earlier  form 
does  not  prove  clear  discrimination.  In  the  case  of  one  boy 
of  five  the  two  forms  were  clearly  distinguished,  but  this  child 
was  from  a  cultured  family,  and  had  presumably  enjoyed 
some  amount  of  home  guidance.  In  the  case  of  the  rougher 
and  less  sophisticated  class  of  children  it  appears  to  be  a 
general  rule  that  the  draughtsman  settles  down  to  some 
one  habitual  way  of  drawing  the  human  face  and  figure, 
which  can  be  seen  to  run  through  all  his  drawings,  with 
only  this  difference,  that  some  are  made  more  complete 
than  others  by  the  addition  of  mouth,  arms,  etc.  Even  the 
fact  of  the  use  of  one  or  two  eyes  by  the  same  child  at  the 
same  date  does  not  appear  to  me  to  point  to  a  clear  distinc- 
tion in  his  mind  between  a  front  and  side  view.  The 
omissions  in  these  cases  may  more  readily  be  explained  as 
the  result  of  occasional  fatigue  and  carelessness,  or,  in  some 
cases,  of  want  of  room,  or  as  indicating  the  point  of  transi- 
tion from  an  older  and  cruder  to  a  later  and  more  complete 
scheme  of  profile.  This  conclusion  is  supported  by  the 
fact  that  a  child  of  six  or  seven,  when  asked  to  draw  from 


368  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  life,  will  give  the  same  scheme,  whether  the  model 
presents  a  front  or  a  side  view.  This  has  been  observed 
by  M.  Passy  in  the  drawings  of  himself  which  he  obtained 
from  his  own  children,  by  General  Pitt-Rivers  in  the 
drawings  of  uneducated  adults,  and  by  others.  We  may 
say,  then,  that  children  left  to  themselves  are  disposed  each 
to  adopt  some  single  stereotyped  mode  of  representing  the 
human  figure  which  happens  to  please  his  fancy.1 

In  this  naive  childish  art  of  profile  drawing  we  have 
something  which  at  first  seems  far  removed  from  the  art  of 
uncivilised  races.  No  doubt,  as  Grosse  urges,  the  drawings 
of  savages  discovered  in  North  America,  Africa,  Australia,  are 
technically  greatly  superior  to  children's  clumsy  impossible 
performances.  Yet  points  of  contact  disclose  themselves. 
If  a  North  American  Indian  is  incapable  of  producing  the 
stupid  scheme  of  a  front  view  of  the  mouth  and  side  view  of 
the  nose,  he  may,  as  we  have  seen,  occasionally  succumb  to 
the  temptation  to  bring  both  eyes  into  a  profile  drawing. 
We  may  see,  too,  how  in  trying  to  represent  action,  and  to 
exhibit  the  active  limb  as  he  must  do  laterally,  the  untutored 
nature-man  is  apt  to  get  odd  results,  as  may  be  observed  in 
the  accompanying  drawing  by  a  North  American  Indian  of 

1  These  results  do  not  seem  to  agree  with  those  of  M.  Passy  or  of 
Professor  Barnes.  M.  Passy  distinguishes  in  children's  drawings  a 
front  and  a  side  view,  both  of  which  may  be  used  by  the  same  child  at 
the  same  time.  The  former  consists  of  nose  and  mouth  of  profile  and 
eyes  and  ears  of  full  face,  the  latter,  of  nose  and  mouth  of  profile 
with  one  eye  and  one  ear  ;  that  is  to  say  the  two  differ  only  in  the 
number  of  eyes  and  ears  (Revue  Philosophique,  1891,  p.  614  ff.).  It 
would  be  interesting  to  know  on  how  large  an  examination  this 
generalisation  is  based.  As  suggested  above,  the  occasional  omission 
of  the  second  eye  and  ear  where  both  are  commonly  used  can  be 
explained  without  supposing  the  child  to  distinguish  between  profile 
and  full  face.  Professor  Barnes  goes  so  far  as  to  state  with  numerical 
exactness  the  relative  frequency  of  profile  and  full  face  by  children 
at  different  stages.  He  makes,  however,  no  serious  attempt  to  explain 
the  criterion  by  which  he  would  distinguish  the  two  modes  of  re- 
presentation (see  his  article,  Pedagogical  Seminary,  ii.,  p.  455  ff.). 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


369 


a  man  shooting  (Fig.  39  (tf)).1    This  may  be  compared  with 
the  accompanying  Egyptian  drawing  (Fig.  39 


Fig.  39  (a).  Fig.  39  (b). 

I  have  already  touched  on  the  modifications  which  ap- 
pear in  a  child's  drawing  of  the  human  figure  when  the 
sculpturesque  attitude  of  repose  gives  place  to  the  dramatic 
attitude  of 
action.  This 
transition  to  the 
representation 
of  action  marks 
the  substitution 
of  a  more  real- 
istic concrete 

treatment       for         W  M  Fig.  40  (6). 

the  early  ab- 
stract symbolic 
treatment.  Very 
amusing  are  some  of  the  devices  by  which  a  child  trie3  to 
indicate  this.  As  Ricci  has  pointed  out,  the  arm  will  some- 
times be  curved  in  order  to  make  it  reach,  say,  the  face 
of  an  adversary  (Fig.  40  («)).  A  similar  introduction  of 
curvature  appears  in  the  accompanying  drawing  from  a  scalp 
inscription  (Fig.  40  (£)).  Sometimes  a  curious  symbolism 
appears,  as  if  to  eke  out  the  deficiencies  of  the  artist's  technical 

1  Taken  from  Schoolcraft,  vol.  i.,  pi.  48. 
"  From  Maspero's  Dawn  of  Civilisation,  p.  469. 
24 


Fig.  40  (a). 


370 


•STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


resources,  as  when  a  boy  of  five  represents  the  junction  of 
two  persons'  hands  by  connecting  them  with  a  line  (Fig. 
40  (c)).1  With  this  may  be  compared  the  well-known 
device  of  indicating  the  direction  of  sight  by  drawing  a  line 
from  the  eye  to  the  object.2  The  most  impossible  attitudes 
occur  when  new  positions  of  the  legs  are  attempted,  as  in 


Fig.  40  (c). 


Fig.  40  (d). 


Fig.  4o  (/). 

the  accompanying  endeavours  to  draw  the  act  of  running, 
kneeling  to  play  marbles,  and  kicking  a  football  (Fig.  40 
(d\  (e\  and  (/)). 

One  other  point  needs  to  be  referred  to  before  we  leave 
the  human  figure,  viz.,  the  treatment  of  accessories.     As 


1  This  I  take  to  be  the  meaning  of  this  odd  arrangement. 

2  Cf.  Barnes,  loc.  cit. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


371 


Fig.  41. 


pointed  out,  the  child  when  left  to  himself  is  for  the  most 

part  oblivious  of  dress,  though  the  triangular  cape-like  form 

of  the  body  may  be  a  rude  attempt 

to  delineate  a  clothed   figure.     In 

general  he  cares  merely  to  crown 

his  figure  with  the  hat  of  dignity, 

and,  at  most,  to  ornament  the  body 

with  a  row  of  buttons.     Even  when 

he  grows  sophisticated  and  attempts 

clothes  he  still  shows  his  primitive 

respect  for  the  natural  frame.     A 

well-known  anthropologist  tells  me 

that  his  little  boy  on  watching  his 

mother  draw  a  lady  insisted  on  her 

putting  in  the  legs  before  shading 

in  the  petticoats.     In  General  Pitt-Rivers'  collection  there 

is  a  drawing  by  a  boy  of  ten  which  in  clothing  the  figure 

naively  indicates  the  limbs  through  their  covering  (Fig.  41). 

This  agrees  with  what  Von  Steinen  tells  us  of  the  way  the 

Brazilian  Indians  drew  him  and  his  companions. 

Yet  the  artificial  culture  which  children  in  the  better 
classes  of  a  civilised  community  are  wont  to  receive  is  apt 
to  develop  a  precocious 
respect  for  raiment,  and 
this  respect  is  reflected  in 
their  drawings.  The  early 
introduction  of  buttons  has 
been  illustrated  above.  One 
boy  of  six  was  so  much  in 
love  with  these  that  he 
covered  the  bust  with  them 
(Fig.  42  (a)).  Girls  are 
wont  to  lay  great  emphasis 
on  the  lady's  feathered  hat 


Fig.  42  (a). 


Fig.  42  (6). 


and  parasol,  as  in  the  accompanying  drawing  by  a  maiden 
of  six  (Fig.  42  (&)).     Throughout  this  use  of  apparel  in  the 


3/2  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

crude  stage  of  child-art  we  see  the  desire  to  characterise 
sex,  rank,  and  office,  as  when  the  man  is  given  his  hat,  the 
soldier  his  military  cap,  and  so  forth.  This  applies,  too, 
of  course,  to  such  frequent  accessories  as  the  walking-stick 
(or  less  frequently  the  whip,  as  in  Fig.  35  (b\  p.  363)  and 
the  pipe,  each  of  which  is  made  the  most  of  in  giving 
manliness  of  look.  The  pipe,  it  may  be  added,  figures 
bravely  in  a  drawing  of  a  European  by  one  of  Von 
Steinen's  Brazilians. 

First  Drawings  of  Animals. 

Many  of  the  characteristics  observable  in  the  child's 
treatment  of  the  human  figure  reappear  in  his  mode  of 
representing  animal  forms.  This  domain  of  child-art 
follows  quickly  on  the  first.  Children's  interest  in  animals, 
especially  quadrupeds,  leads  them  to  draw  them  at  an 
early  stage.  In  prescribed  exercises,  moreover,  the  cat  and 
the  duck  appear  to  figure  amongst  the  earliest  models.  An 
example  of  this  early  attempt  to  draw  animals  has  been 
given  above  (p.  334,  Fig.  i). 

The  first  crude  attempts  about  the  age 
of  three  or  four  to  draw  animal  forms 
exhibit  great  incompleteness  of  conception 
and  want  of  a  sense  of  position  and  pro- 
portion. In  one  case  the  head  seems  to  be 
drawn,  but  no  body — if,  indeed,  head  and 
body  are  not  confused  ;  and  in  others  where 
a  differentiation  of  head  and  trunk  is 
attempted  there  is  no  clear  local  separation, 
or  if  this  is  attempted  there  is  no  clear 
indication  of  the  mode  of  connexion  (see, 
for  example,  Fig.  43  (a)).  In  the  case  of 

Fig.  43  (a). A      animals  the  side  view  is  for  obvious  reasons 

duck.  hit  on  from  the  first.     But,  needless  to  say, 

there  is  no  clear  representation  of  the  profile  head.     As 
a  rule  we  have  the  front  view,  or  at  least  the  insertion  of 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


373 


the  two  eyes.  Both  eyes  appear  in  Mr.  Cooke's  illustra- 
tions of  drawings  of  the  cat  by  children  between  three  and 
four  (Fig.  43  (£)),  as  also  commonly  in  drawings  of  horses. 
The  position  of  the  eyes  is  often  odd  enough,  these  organs 
being  in  one  drawing  by  a  boy  of  five  pushed  up  into  the 
•ears  (Fig.  43  (^r)  ).*  The  front  view  of  the  animal  head 


Fig.  43  (c). — A  horse. 


Fig.  43  (d). —  A  horse. 


along  with  profile  body  appears  occasionally  in  savage 
drawings  also.2  In  some  of  children's  drawings  we  see 
traces  of  a  mixed  scheme.  Thus  I  have  a  drawing  by  a 
boy  of  five  in  which  a  front  view  is  reached  by  a  kind  of 
doubling  of  the  profile  (Fig.  43  (d) ). 
More  remarkable  than  all,  per- 
haps, we  have  in  one  case  a  clear 
instance  of  the  scheme  of  the 
human  face,  the  features,  eyes,  nose, 
and  mouth  being  arranged  hori-  Fig-  44  00--A  horse, 
zontally  to  suit  the  new  circumstances  (Fig.  44  (a)}.  With 
this  may  be  compared  the  accompanying  transference  of 

1  Mr.  Cooke  kindly  informs  me  that  in  an  early  Greek  drawing 
in  the  First  Vase  Room  in  the  British  Museum,  the  eye  of  a  fish  is 
placed  in  the  back  part  of  the  mouth. 

2  An  example  is  given  by  Schoolcraft,  op.  cit.,  pt.  iv.,  pi.  18. 


374 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


the  animal  ear  to  the  human  figure,  though  this  suggests — 
especially  in  view  of  the  pipe — a  bit  of  jocosity  on  the  part 
of  the  young  draughtsman  (Fig.  44  (b]  ). 

The  forms  of  both  head  and  trunk  vary  greatly.  In  a 
few  drawings  I  have  found  the  extreme  of  abstract  treat- 
ment in  the  drawing  of  the  trunk,  viz.,  by  means  of  a 
single  line,  a  device  which,  so  far  as  I  have  observed,  is 
only  resorted  to  in  the  case  of  the  human  figure  for  the 
neck  and  the  limbs.  An  example  of  this  was  given  above 
in  Fig.  i  (p.  334).  The  following  drawing  of  a  dog  by  a 
little  girl  between  five  and  six  years  old  illustrates  the  same 


Fig.  44  (c).— A  dog. 


Fig.  44  (b}. 


Fig.  44  (d). 


thing  (Fig.  44  (f)).1  On  the  other  hand  we  see  sometimes  a 
tendency  to  give  the  trunk  abnormal  thickness,  as  if  the 
model  used  had  been  the  wooden  toy-horse,  as  in  the 
accompanying  drawing  by  a  boy  of  five  (Fig.  44  (d~} ). 
Rectilinear  instead  of  rounded  forms  occur,  and  the  head 
is  often  triangular,  these  rectilinear  contours  being  probably 

1  Line  drawings  of  animals  as  well  as  of  men  are  found  in  savage 
art:  see,  for  example,  Schoolcraft,  op.  cit.,  pt.  iv.,  pi.  18.  Mr.  Cooke 
gives  examples  from  drawings  of  the  Trojans.  Hence  line  drawing 
may,  as  he  infers,  be  the  primitive  mode. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


375 


suggested  by  the  teacher  in  his  model  schemes  (see  Fig. 

44  (*))• 

The  legs  are  of  course 
all  visible.  The  strangest 
inattention  to  number  be- 
trays itself  here.  As  we 

u-i  i    •      u      •       •  Fig.  44  (e). — A  horse, 

saw,  a  child   in  beginning 

his  scribble-drawing  piles  on  lines  for  the  legs  (see  above, 
p.  334,  Fig.  i).  A  girl  between  three  and  four  years 
of  age  endowed  a  cat  with  two  legs  and  a  bird  with 
three  (see  Fig.  45  (a)  and  (b)}.1  A  boy  in  his  sixth 
year  drew  a  quadruped  with  ten  legs  (Fig.  45  (c)}. 
They  are  often  drawn  absurdly  out  of  position.  In  more 


Fig.  45  (6).— A  bird. 


Fig.  45  (a).— A  cat. 
i  Whiskers ;  2  Tail. 


•""' 

^777777 

Fig.  45  (c). — A  quadruped. 


Fig.  45  (d). — Some 

quadruped.  Fig.  45  (e). — A  mouse. 

than  one  case  I  find  them  crowded  behind,  as  in  the 
accompanying  drawing  of  some  quadruped  by  the  same 
little  girl  that  drew  the  cat  and  the  bird,  and  in  a  drawing 
of  a  mouse  by  another  child  about  the  same  age,  viz., 
three  and  a  half  years  (Fig.  45  (d)  and  (<?)).  They  com- 

1  This  is  the  way  in  which  Mr.  Cooke,  who  sends  me  these  two 
drawings,  explains  them  to  me.  The  beak  (?)  in  Fig.  45  (b)  is  added 
to  the  contour,  as  is  the  human  nose  in  a  few  cases. 


376 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


monly  remain  apart  from  one  another  throughout  their 
course,  following  roughly  a  parallel  direction.  But  this 
simple  scheme  is  soon  modified,  first  of  all  by  enlarging 
the  space  between  the  fore  and  the  hind  legs,  and  then  by 
introducing  some  change  of  direction  answering  to  the  look 
of  the  animal  in  motion.  This  is  most  easily  effected  by 
making  the  fore  and  the  hind  pair  diverge  downwards,  as  in 
Fig.  43  (fr)  and  (c)  (p.  373).  In  rarer  cases  the  divergence 
appears  between  the  two  legs  of  the  fore  and  of  the  hind  pair 
(Fig.  45  (f) ).  The  knee-bend  is  early  introduced  as  a 


Fig-  45 


means  of  suggesting  motion.  Either  the  legs  are  all  bent 
backwards,  as  in  Fig.  45  (g)  (cf.  above,  Fig.  44  (e)  )  ; 
or,  with  what  looks  like  a  perverted  feeling  for  symmetry, 
each  pair  is  bent  inwardly,  as  in  Fig.  45  (h).  The 
forms  are  often  extraordinary  enough,  a  preternatural 
thickness  of  leg  being  not  infrequently  given,  and  the  knee- 
joint  occasionally  taking  on  grotesque  shapes  as  if  the  little 
draughtsman  had  just  been  attending  a  class  on  the  anatomy 
of  the  skeleton.  The  hoof  is  drawn  in  a  still  freer  manner, 
various  designs,  as  the  bird-foot,  the  circle,  and  the  looped 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  377 

pattern,  appearing  here  as  in  the  case  of  the  human  foot 
(Fig.  45  (*')  and  (/) ;  cf.  Figs.  43  (c)  and  44  (a)  (p.  373)). 


Fig.  45  («>  Fig'  45 

In  this  unlearned  attempt  to  draw  animal  forms  the 
child  falls  far  below  the  level  of  the  untutored  savag"e.  The 
drawings  of  animals  by  the  North  American  Indians,  by 
Africans,  and  others,  have  been  justly  praised  for  their 
artistic  excellence.  A  fine  perception  of  form  is,  in  many 
cases,  at  least,  clearly  recognisable,  the  due  covering  of  one 
part  by  another  is  represented,  and  movement  is  vigorously 
suggested.  Lover  though  he  is  of  animals,  the  child,  when 
compared  with  the  uncivilised  adult,  shows  himself  to  be 
woefully  ignorant  of  his  pets. 

Men  on  Horseback,  etc. 

Childish  drawing  moves  as  the  dialectic  progress  of 
the  Hegelian  thought  from  distinction  and  antithesis  to  a 
synthesis  or  unity  which  embraces  the  distinction.  After 
illustrating  the  human  biped  in  his  contradistinction  to  the 
quadruped  he  proceeds  to  combine  them  in  a  higher 
artistic  unity,  the  man  on  horseback.  The  special  interest 
of  this  department  of  childish  drawing  lies  in  the  fresh  and 
genial  manner  of  the  combining.  To  draw  a  man  and  a 
horse  apart  is  one  thing,  to  fit  the  two  figures  one  to  the 
other,  quite  another. 

At  first  the  degree  of  connexion  is  slight.  There  is  no 
suggestion  of  a  composite  or  mixed  animal,  such  as  may 
have  suggested  to  the  lively  Greek  imagination  the  myth 
of  the  centaur.  The  human  figure  is  pitched  on  to  the 
quadruped  in  the  most  unceremonious  fashion.  Thus  in 


378 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


many  cases  there  is  no  attempt  even  to  combine  the  profile 
aspects,  the  man  appearing  impudently  in  frontal  aspect,  or 

what  would  be  so  but  for  the 
lateral  nasal  excrescence,  as  in 
the  accompanying  drawing  by  a 
boy  of  five  (Fig.  46). 

With  this  indifference  to  a 
consistent  profile  there  goes 
amazing  slovenliness  in  attaching 
the  man  to  the  animal,  and  this 
whether  the  front  or  side  view  of 
the  human  figure  is  introduced. 
No  attempt  is  made  in  many 
cases  to  show  attachment  :  the 


Fig.  46. 


man  is  drawn  just  above  the  quadruped,  that  is  all.  It 
seems  to  be  a  chance  whether  the  two  figures  meet, 
whether  the  feet  of  the  man  rest  circus-fashion  on  the 
animal's  back,  or,  lastly,  whether  the  human  form  is  drawn 
in  part  over  the  animal,  and,  if  so,  at  what  height  it  is  to- 


Fig.  47  (a). 


Fig-  47  (0- 

emerge  from  the  animal's  back.    Various  arrangements  occur 

in  the  same  sheet  of  drawings  (see  Fig.  47  (a),  (fr)  and  (<;)). 

When  this  overlapping  takes  place  the  presence  of  the 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  379 

animal's  trunk  makes  no  difference  in  the  treatment  of  the 
man.  He  is  drawn  with  his  two  legs  just  as  if  he  were  in 
relief  against  the  horse  ;  and  this  arrangement  is  apt  to 
persist  even  when  a  child  can  draw  a  rude  semblance  of  a 
horse  and  knows  at  what  level  to  place  the  rider.  So  difficult 
to  the  little  artist  is  this  idea  of  one  thing  covering  another 
that  even  when  he  comes  to  know  that  both  the  legs  of  the 
rider  are  not  seen,  he  may  get  confused  and  erase  both  (see 
above  (p.  376),  Fig.  45  (/)  ).a 

The  savage  is  in  general  as  much  above  the  child  in  the 
representation  of  the  rider  as  he  is  in  that  of  the  animal 
apart.  Yet  traces  of  similar  confusion  do 
undoubtedly  appear.  Von  Steinen  says  that 
his  Brazilians  drew  the  rider  with  both  legs 
showing.  Andree  gives  an  illustration,  ( 
among  the  stone-carvings  (petroglyphs)  of  Fig.  48  (a). 
savages,  of  the  employment  of  a  front  view  of  the  human 
figure  rising  above  the  horse  with  no  legs  showing  below  (Fig. 
48  (a)).2  Even  among  the  drawings  of  the  North  American 
Indians,  in  which  the  horse  is  in  general  so  well  outlined,  we 
occasionally  find  what  appear  to  be  the  germs  of  confusions 
similar  to  those  of  the  child.  Thus  Schoolcraft  gives  among 
drawings  from  an  inscription  on  a 
buffalo  skin  one  in  which  we  have  above 
the  profile  view  of  a  horse  the  front  view 
of  a  man,  with  arms  stretched  out  later- 
ally while  the  legs  are  wanting.3  A 
clearer  case  of  confusion  is  supplied  by 
the  following  drawing,  also  by  a  North  Fig-  48 

American  Indian,  in  which  the  lines  of  the  horse's  body  cut 
those  of  the  rider's  legs  (Fig.  48  (£)).4 

1  Cf.  Ricci,  op.  cit.,  Fig.  21  (p.  27). 

2  Op.  cit.,  pi.  2 ;   cf.  pi.  6,  where  a  drawing  from  Siberia  with 
the  same  mode  of  treatment  is  given. 

3  Op.  cit.,  pt.  iv.,  pi.  31  (p.  251). 

4  From  the  Annual  Report  of  the  Bureau  of  Ethnology,  1882-83,  p. 
206.    The  common  appearance  of  both  legs  in  these  Indian  drawings 
means,  I  take  it,  that  the  rider  is  on  the  side  of  the  horse. 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


The  same  tendency  to  show  the  whole  man  where  the 
circumstances  hide  a  part  appears  in  children's  drawings 
of  a  man  in  a  boat,  a  railway  carriage  and  so  forth.  Ricci 
has  shown  that  the  different  ways  in  which  the  child-artist 
puts  a  human  figure  in  a  boat  are  as  numerous  as  those 
in  which  he  sets  it  on  a  horse.  The  figure  may  stand  out 
above  the  boat  or  overlap,  in  which  last  case  it  may  be  cut 
across  by  the  deck-line  and  its  lower  part  shown,  or  be 
clapped  wholly  below  the  deck,  or  again  be  half  immersed 
in  the  water  below  the  boat,  or,  lastly,  where  an  attempt 
to  respect  fact  is  made,  be  truncated,  the  trunk  appearing 


Fig.  49  (6). 


Fig.  49  (a). 


Fig.  49  (c). 


Fig-  49 


through  the  side  of  the  boat,  though  the  legs  are  wanting.1 
A  man  set  in  a  house,  train,  or  tram  car,  is  seen  in  his 
totality  (Fig.  49  (a)  and  (b)  ).  It  is  much  the  same  thing 
when  a  child  flattens  out  a  house  or  other  object  so  as  to 
show  us  its  three  sides,  that  is  to  say  one  which  in  reality 
is  hidden  (Fig.  49  (c)  and  (d)  ).  With  these  habits  of  the 
1  See  Ricci,  op.  cit.,  pp.  17-23. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN. 


381 


child  may  be  compared  those  of  the  savage.  The  impulse 
to  show  everything,  even  what  is  covered,  is  illustrated  in 
a  drawing  of  a  singer  in  his  wigwam  by  an  Indian  (Fig.  49 
(£)).1  Even  where  colour  comes  in  and  one 
thing  has  to  be  hidden  by  a  part  of  another 
thing  the  savage  artist,  like  the  child  insists 
on  drawing  the  whole.  This  is  illustrated  in 
a  curious  custom,  the  drawing  of  two  serpents 
(in  dry,  coloured  powder)  by  North  American 
fire-dancers.  They  are  drawn  across  one 


Fig.  49  (e). 


another,  and  the  artist  has   first   to   draw  completely  the 
one  partly  covered,  and  then  the  second  over  the  first.2 

The  child's  drawing  of  the  house,  though  less  remark- 
able than  that  of  the  man  and  the  quadruped,  has  a  certain 
interest.  It  illustrates,  as  we  have  just  seen,  not  merely 
his  determination  to  render  visible  what  is  hidden,  but 
also  his  curious  feeling  for 
position  and  proportion. 
In  one  case  I  found  that 
in  the  desire  to  display 
the  contents  of  a  house  a 
girl  of  six  had  actually 
set  a  table  between  the 
chimneys.  The  accom- 
panying drawing  done  by 
the  boy  C.  at  the  age  of 
five  years  five  months 


Fig.  50- 


illustrates  the  fine  childish  contempt  for  proportion  (Fig. 
50).  A  curious  feature  in  these  drawings  of  the  house  is 
the  care  bestowed  on  certain  details,  pre-eminently  the 
window.  This  is  even  a  more  important  characteristic 
feature  than  the  chimney  with  its  loops  of  smoke.  Some 

1  Andree  observes  that  in  Australian  drawings  objects  behind 
one  another  are  put  above  one  another  as  in  a  certain  stage  of 
Egyptian  art  (op.  cit.,  p.  172). 

-  Annual  Report  of  Bureau  of  Ethnology,  1883-84,  p.  444  ff. 


382  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

children  give  a  quite  loving  care  to  the  window,  drawing 
the  lace  curtains,  the  flowers,  and  so  forth. 


Resume,  of  Facts. 

We  may  now  sum  up  the  main  results  of  our  study. 
We  find  in  the  drawings  of  untrained  children  from  about 
the  age  of  three  to  that  of  eight  or  ten  a  curious  mode  of 
dealing  with  the  most  familiar  forms.  At  no  stage  of 
this  child-art  can  we  find  what  we  should  regard  as  ele- 
ments of  artistic  value  :  yet  it  has  its  quaint  and  its  sugges- 
tive side. 

The  first  thing  that  strikes  us  here  is  that  this  child- 
delineation,  crude  and  bizarre  as  it  is,  illustrates  a  process 
of  development.  Thus  we  have  (a)  the  stage  of  vague 
formless  scribble,  (£)  that  of  primitive  design,  typified  by 
what  I  have  called  the  lunar  scheme  of  the  human  face, 
and  (c)  that  of  a  more  sophisticated  treatment  of  the  human 
figure,  as  well  as  of  animal  forms. 

This  process  of  art-evolution  has  striking  analogies 
with  that  of  organic  evolution.  It  is  clearly  a  movement 
from  the  vague  or  indefinite  to  the  definite,  a  process  of 
gradual  specialisation.  Not  only  so,  we  may  note  that  it 
begins  with  the  representation  of  those  rounded  or  ovoid 
contours  which  seem  to  constitute  the  basal  forms  of  animal 
organisms,  and  proceeds  like  organic  evolution  by  a  gradual 
differentiation  of  the  '  homogeneous '  structure  through  the 
addition  of  detailed  parts  or  organs.  These  organs  in  their 
turn  gradually  assume  their  characteristic  forms.  It  is, 
perhaps,  worth  observing  here  that  some  of  the  early  draw- 
ings of  animals  are  strongly  suggestive  of  embryo  forms 
(compare,  e.g.,  Fig.  45  (£)  and  (d\  p.  375). 

If  now  we  examine  this  early  drawing  on  its  representa- 
tive side  we  find  that  it  is  crude  and  defective  enough.  It 
proceeds  by  giving  a  bare  outline  of  the  object,  with  at 
most  one  or  two  details  thrown  in.  The  form  neither  of 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  383 

the  whole  nor  of  the  parts  is  correctly  rendered.  Thus  in 
drawing  the  foot  it  is  enough  for  the  child  to  indicate  the 
angle  :  the  direction  of  the  foot-line  is  comparatively  im- 
material. In  this  respect  a  child's  drawing  differs  from 
a  truly  artistic  sketch  or  suggestive  indication  by  a  few 
characteristic  lines,  which  is  absolutely  correct  so  far  as  it 
goes.  The  child  is  content  with  a  schematic  treatment, 
which  involves  an  appreciable  and  even  considerable  de- 
parture from  truthful  representation.  Thus  the  primitive 
lunar  drawing  of  the  human  face  is  manifestly  rather  a 
diagrammatic  scheme  than  an  imitative  representation  of  a 
concrete  form. 

In  this  non-imitative  and  merely  indicative  treatment 
there  is  room  for  all  sorts  of  technical  inaccuracies.  Form 
is  woefully  misapprehended,  as  in  the  circular  trunk,  the 
oblong  mouth,  the  claw  foot,  and  so  forth.  Proportion — 
even  in  its  simple  aspect  of  equality — is  treated  with  con- 
tempt in  many  instances  (cf.  the  legs  of  the  quadruped 
and  the  bird  in  Fig.  45  (a),  (b\  and  (c)  (p.  375)).  What 
is  no  less  important,  division  of  space  and  relative 
position  of  parts,  which  seem  vital  even  to  a  diagram- 
matic treatment,  are  apt  to  be  overlooked,  as  in  drawing 
the  facial  features  high  up,  in  attaching  the  arms  to  the 
head,  and  so  forth.  Even  the  element  of  number  is  made 
light  of,  and  this,  too,  in  such  simple  circumstances  as  when 
drawing  the  legs  of  an  animal. 

One  of  the  most  curious  of  these  misrepresentations 
comes  into  view  in  the  third  or  sophisticated  stage,  viz.,  the 
introduction  of  more  than  is  visible.  This  error,  again, 
assumes  a  milder  and  a  graver  form,  viz.,  (a)  the  giving  of 
the  features  more  distinctly  and  completely  than  they  appear 
in  the  object  represented,  and  (b}  the  introducing  of  features 
which  have  no  place  in  the  object  represented.  Examples 
of  the  first  are  the  introduction  of  the  nasal  angle  into  the 
front  view  of  the  human  face ;  the  separation  throughout 
their  length  of  the  four  legs  of  the  horse  ;  and  such  odd 


384  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

tricks  as  detaching  the  reins  of  the  horse  from  the  animal, 
as  in  Fig.  51  (a).  Illustrations  of  the  second  are  numerous 

and  varied.  They  in- 
clude first  of  all  the 
naive  introduction  of 
features  of  an  object 
which  are  not  on  the 
spectator's  side  and  so 
in  view,  as  the  second 
eye  and  the  second  arm 

ig.  5I  (fl).  in    what    are    predomi- 

nantly profile  repre- 
sentations. With  these  may  be  classed  the  attempt  to 
exhibit  three  sides  of  a  house.  Closely  related  to  these 
errors  of  perspective  is  the  exposure  of  objects  or  parts  of 
objects  which  are  covered  by  others.  It  is  possible  that  the 
spread-eagle  arrangement  of  the  two  joined  arms  is  an 
attempt  to  represent  a  feature  of  childish  anatomy,  viz.,  the 
idea  that  the  arms  run  through  and  join  in  the  middle  of 
the  trunk.  A  clearer  example  of  this  attempt  to  expose  to 
view  what  is  covered  is  the  exhibition  of  the  whole  human 

figure  in  a  boat,  house  or 
carriage.  With  this  may 
be  compared  the  disclosure 
of  the  whole  head  of  a 
horse  when  drinking,  as  in 
the  accompanying  drawing 

by  a  boy  of  five  (Fig.  51  (£)),  of  the  whole  head  of  the 
man  through  his  hat  (see  above,  p.  350,  Fig.  20  (£)),  and 
of  the  human  limbs  through  the  clothes  (Fig.  41,  p.  371). 

A  class  of  confusions,  having  a  certain  similarity  to  some 
of  these,  consists  in  the  transference  of  the  features  of  one 
object  to  a  second,  as  when  a  man  or  quadruped  is  given  a 
bird-like  foot  (Figs.  7  (d)  and  43  (c\  pp.  342,  373),  and  still 
more  manifestly  when  the  facial  scheme  of  the  man  is  trans- 
ferred to  the  quadruped  or  vice  versa  (Fig.  44  (a)  and  (b), 

PP-  373,  374). 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  385 

These  last  errors  clearly  illustrate  the  tendency  to  a  con- 
ventional treatment,  a  tendency  which,  as  I  have  observed 
already,  runs  through  children's  spontaneous  drawings. 
This  free  conventional  handling  of  natural  forms  has  been 
illustrated  in  the  habitual  drawing  of  the  mouth  and  eyes, 
and  still  more  strikingly  in  that  of  the  hands  and  feet. 

Paradoxical  though  it  may  seem,  these  drawings,  while 
in  general  bare  and  negligent  of  details,  show  in  certain 
directions  a  quite  amusing  attention  to  them.  Thus,  we 
find  at  a  very  early  stage  certain  details,  as  the  pipe  of 
the  man,  insisted  on  with  extravagant  emphasis  ;  and  may 
observe  at  a  somewhat  later  stage  in  the  elaborate  drawing 
of  hair,  buttons,  parasol,  and  so  forth,  a  tendency  to  give 
some  feature  to  which  the  child  attaches  value  a  special 
prominence  and  degree  of  completeness. 

The  art  of  children  is  a  thing  by  itself,  and  must  not 
straight  away  be  classed  with  the  rude  art  of  the  untrained 
adult.  As  adult,  the  latter  has  knowledge  and  technical 
resources  above  those  of  the  little  child  ;  and  these  points  of 
superiority  show  themselves,  for  example,  in  the  fine  delinea- 
tion of  animal  forms  by  Africans  and  others.1  At  the  same 
time,  after  allowing  for  these  differences,  it  is,  I  think,  incon- 
testable that  a  number  of  characteristic  traits  in  children's 
drawings  are  reflected  in  those  of  untutored  savages. 

Explanation  of  Facts. 

Let  us  now  see  how  we  are  to  explain  these  character- 
istics. In  order  to  do  so  we  must  try  to  understand  what 

1  The  tendency  to  identify  the  drawings  of  the  child  and  the 
savage  led  to  an  amusing  error  on  the  part  of  a  certain  Abbe 
Domenech,  who  in  1860  published  his  so-called  Livre  des  Sauvages, 
which  purported  to  contain  the  graphic  characters  and  drawings  of 
North  American  Aztecs,  but  proved  in  reality  to  be  nothing  but  the 
scribbling  book  of  a  boy  of  German  parentage.  The  drawings  are  of 
the  crudest,  and  show  the  artist  to  be  much  more  nasty-minded  than 
the  savage  draughtsmen. 

25 


386  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

process  a  child's  mind  goes  through  when  he  draws  some- 
thing, and  to  compare  this  with  what  passes  in  the  mind  of 
an  adult  artist.  The  problem  has,  it  is  evident,  to  do  with 
drawing  from  memory  or  out  of  one's  head,  for  though  the 
child  may  begin  to  draw  by  help  of  models,  he  develops  his 
characteristic  art  in  complete  independence  of  these. 

In  order  to  draw  an  object  from  memory  two  things 
are  obviously  necessary.  We  must  have  at  the  outset  an 
idea  of  the  form  we  wish  to  represent,  and  this  visual  image 
of  the  form  must  somehow  translate  itself  into  a  series  of 
manual  movements  corresponding  to  its  several  parts.  In 
other  words,  it  presupposes  both  an  initial  conception  and 
a  correlated  process  of  execution. 

In  psychological  language  this  correlation  or  co-ordina- 
tion between  the  idea  of  a  form  and  the  carrying  out  of  the 
necessary  movements  of  the  hand  is  expressed  by  saying 
that  the  visual  image,  say,  of  the  curve  of  the  full  face,  calls 
up  the  associated  image  of  the  manual  movement.  This 
last,  again,  may  mean  either  the  visual  image  of  the  hand 
executing  the  required  movement,  or  the  image  of  the  mus- 
cular sensations  experienced  when  the  arm  is  moved  in  the 
required  way,  or  possibly  both  of  these. 

The  process  of  drawing  a  whole  form  is  of  course  more 
complex  than  this,  each  step  in  the  operation  being  adjusted 
to  preceding  steps.  How  far  the  movements  of  the  draughts- 
man's hands  are  guided  here  by  a  visual  image  of  the  form, 
which  remains  present  throughout,  how  far  by  attention  to 
what  has  already  been  set  down,  may  not  be  quite  certain. 
Judging  from  my  own  case,  I  should  describe  the  process 
somewhat  after  this  fashion.  In  drawing  a  human  face  we 
set  out  with  a  visual  image  of  the  whole,  which  is  incomplete 
in  respect  of  details,  but  represents  roughly  size  and 
general  form  or  outline.  This  image  is  projected  indistinctly 
and  unsteadily,  of  course,  on  the  sheet  of  paper  before  us, 
and  this  projected  image  controls  the  whole  operation.  But 
as  we  advance  we  pay  more  and  more  attention  to  the  visual 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  387 

presentation  supplied  by  the  portion  of  the  drawing  already 
produced,  and  only  realise  with  any  distinctness  that  part 
of  the  projected  visual  image  which  is  just  in  advance  of  the 
pencil. 

It  is  evident  that  the  carrying  out  of  such  a  prolonged 
operation  involves  a  perfected  mechanism  of  eye,  brain  and 
hand  connexions ;  for  much  of  the  manual  adjustment  is 
instantaneous  and  sub-conscious.  At  the  same  time  the 
process  illustrates  a  very  high  measure  of  volitional  control 
or  concentration.  Unless  we  keep  the  original  design  fixed 
before  us,  and  attend  at  each  stage  to  the  relations  of  the 
executed  to  the  unexecuted  part,  we  are  certain  to  go  wrong. 
Practice  tends,  of  course,  to  reduce  the  conscious  element 
in  the  process.  In  the  case  of  a  person  accustomed  to  draw 
the  outline  of  a  human  head,  a  cat  or  what  not,  the  operation 
is  very  much  one  of  hand-memory  into  which  visual 
representations  enter  only  faintly.  The  movements  follow 
one  another  of  themselves  without  the  intervention  of  dis- 
tinct visual  images  (whether  that  of  the  linear  form  or  of 
the  moving  hand).  There  is  an  approach  here  to  what 
happens  when  we  put  last  year's  date  to  a  letter,  the  hand 
following  out  an  old  habit. 

Now  the  child  has  to  acquire  the  co-ordinations  here 
briefly  described.  He  may  have  the  visual  image  of  the 
human  face  or  the  horse  which  he  wishes  to  depict.  This 
power  of  visualising  shows  itself  in  other  ways  and  can  be 
independently  tested,  as-  by  asking  a  child  to  describe  the 
object  verbally.  But  he  has  as  yet  no  inkling  of  how  to 
reproduce  his  image.  That  his  inability  at  the  outset  is 
due  to  a  want  of  co-ordination  is  seen  in  the  fact  that 
at  this  stage  he  cannot  draw  even  when  a  model  is  before 
his  eyes. 

The  process  of  learning  here  is  very  like  what  takes 
place  when  a  child  learns  to  speak.  The  required  move- 
ments have  somehow  to  be  performed  and  attached  to  the 
effects  they  are  then  found  to  produce.  Just  as  a  child 


388  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

first  produces  sounds,  partly  instinctively  or  spontaneously, 
partly  by  imitating  the  seen  movements  of  another's  lips, 
etc.,  so  he  produces  lines  by  play-like  scribble  and  by 
imitating  the  visible  movements  of  another  person's  hand. 
The  tendency  to  imitate  is  observable  in  the  first  loop- 
formations,  and  possibly  also  in  the  abrupt  angular  changes, 
which  give  a  zig-zag  look  to  some  of  these  early  tracings. 

In  this  early  stage  we  see  a  marked  want  of  control. 
The  effort  is  spasmodic  and  short-lived  :  the  little  draughts- 
man presently  runs  off  into  nonsense  scribble.  The  want 
of  control  is  seen,  too,  in  the  tendency  to  prolong  lines 
unduly,  and  to  repeat  or  multiply  them,  the  primitive  play- 
movements  being  very  much  under  the  empire  of  inertia  or 
habit,  i.e.,  the  tendency  to  repeat  or  go  on  with  an  action. 
The  effect  of  limitating  natural  conditions  in  the  motor 
apparatus  is  illustrated,  not  only  in  the  slightly  curved  form 
of  these  first  scribble  lines,  but  in  the  general  obliquity  or 
inclination  of  the  line  ;  it  being  manifestly  easier  for  the 
hand  when  brought  in  front  of  the  body  to  describe  a  line 
running  slightly  upwards  from  left  to  right  (or  in  the 
reverse  direction)  than  one  running  horizontally.  The  want 
of  control  by  means  of  a  steady  visual  image  is  further  seen 
in  the  absence  of  any  attempt  at  a  plan,  at  a  mapping  out 
of  the  available  space,  and  at  an  observation  of  proportion. 

It  might  be  thought  that,  though  a  child  at  this  inex- 
perienced stage  were  unable  to  produce  the  correct  form  of 
a  familiar  object,  he  would  at  once  detect  the  incorrectness 
of  the  one  he  sets  down.  No  doubt,  if  he  were  in  the  atti- 
tude of  cold  critical  observation,  he  would  do  so  :  in  fact, 
as  Mr.  Cooke  and  others  have  shown,  he  sees  the  absurdities 
of  his  workmanship  as  soon  as  they  are  pointed  out  to  him. 
But  when  drawing  he  is  in  another  sort  of  mood,  akin  to 
that  imaginative  mood  in  which  he  traces  forms  in  the 
plaster  of  the  ceiling,  or  in  the  letters  of  his  spelling-book. 
He  means  to  draw  a  man  or  a  horse,  and  consequently  the 
formless  jumble  of  lines  becomes,  to  his  fancy,  a  man  or  a 


THE    YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  389 

horse.  His  first  drawings  are  thus,  in  a  sense,  playthings, 
which,  like  the  battered  stump  of  a  doll,  his  imaginative 
intention  corrects,  supplements,  and  perfects. 

With  repetition,  and  that  amount  of  supervision  and 
guidance  which  most  children  who  take  a  pencil  in  hand 
manage  to  get  from  somebody,  he  begins  to  note  the  actual 
character  of  his  line-effects,  and  to  associate  these  with  the 
movements  which  produce  them.  A  straight  horizontal 
line,  a  curved  line  returning  upon  itself,  and  so  forth,  come 
to  be  differentiated,  and  to  be  co-ordinated  with  their 
respective  manual  movements. 

We  may  now  pass  to  the  second  stage,  the  beginning  of 
true  linear  representation,  as  illustrated  in  the  first  abstract 
schematic  treatment  of  the  human  face  and  figure. 

A  question  arises  at  the  very  outset  here  as  to  whether, 
and  if  so  to  what  extent,  children  re-discover  this  method 
of  representation  for  themselves.  Here,  as  in  the  case  of 
child-language,  such  as  '  bow-wow/  '  gee-gee,'  tradition  and 
example  undoubtedly  play  their  part.  A  parent,  or  an 
older  brother  and  sister,  in  setting  the  first  models,  is  pretty 
certain  to  adopt  a  simple  scheme,  as  that  of  the  lunar  face ; 
and  even  where  there  is  no  instruction  a  child  is  quick  at 
imitating  other  children's  manner  of  drawing.  Yet  this  does 
not  affect  the  contention  that  such  manner  of  drawing  is 
eminently  childish,  that  is,  the  one  a  child  finds  his  way  to 
most  readily,  any  more  than  the  fact  of  the  nurse's  calling 
the  horse  '  gee-gee  '  in  talking  to  baby  affects  the  contention 
that  '  gee-gee  '  is  eminently  a  baby-name. 

The  scanty  abstract  treatment,  the  circle  enclosing  two 
dots  and  the  vertical  and  horizontal  lines,  points  to  the 
absence  of  any  serious  attempt  to  imitate  a  form  closely 
and  fully.  It  seems  absurd  to  suppose  that  a  child  of  three 
or  four  does  not  image  a  human  face  better  than  he  delineates 
it ;  and  even  if  this  were  doubtful  it  is  certain  that  when 
he  sets  down  a  man  without  hair,  ears,  trunk,  or  arm,  his 
execution  is  falling  far  short  of  his  knowledge.  How  is 


3QO  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

this  to  be  accounted  for  ?  My  explanation  is  that  the  little 
artist  is  still  much  more  of  a  symbolist  than  a  naturalist, 
that  he  does  not  in  the  least  care  about  a  full  and  close 
likeness,  but  wants  only  a  barely  sufficient  indication.  This 
scantiness  of  treatment  issuing  from  want  of  the  more  serious- 
artistic  intention  is  of  course  supported  by  technical  limita- 
tions. The  lunar  face  with  the  two  propping  lines  answers 
to  what  the  child  can  do  easily  and  comfortably.  Much 
more  than  his  elder  brethren  our  small  limner  is  bound  by 
the  law  of  artistic  economy,  the  need  of  producing  his 
effects  with  the  smallest  expenditure  of  labour,  and  of 
making  every  touch  tell. 

Defects  of  executive  resource  and  of  manual  skill 
appear  plainly  in  other  characteristics.  The  common  inclina- 
tion of  the  lines  of  the  legs  points  to  the  unconscious  selec- 
tion of  easiest  directions  of  manual  movement.1  The  unduly 
lengthened  arm  and  leg,  the  multiplication  of  legs — as  seen 
most  strikingly  in  the  case  of  the  quadruped — illustrate  the 
influence  of  motor  or  muscular  inertia.  There  is,  too, 
a  noticeable  want  of  measurement  and  management  of  the 
space  to  be  covered,  as  when  one  eye  is  put  in  so  large 
as  to  leave  no  room  for  a  second,  or  when  filling  in  details 
from  above  downwards  the  eyes  are  put  in  too  near  the 
occipital  curve,  and  so  all  the  features  set  too  high  up. 
The  same  want  of  measurement  of  space  may  contribute  to 
the  child's  habit  of  drawing  the  trunk  so  absurdly  small  in 
proportion  to  the  head  ;  for  he  begins  with  the  head,  and 
by  making  this  large  finds  he  has  not  left,  within  the  limits 
of  what  he  considers  the  right  size  of  figure,  space  enough 
for  the  trunk. 

Very  noticeable  is  the  influence  of  habit  in  this 
abstract  treatment.  By  habit  I  here  mean  hand-memory, 
or  the  tendency  to  combine  movements  in  the  old  ways, 
though  this  is  commonly  aided,  as  we  shall  see,  by  "  asso- 

1  This  is  supported,  in  the  case  of  children  who  have  begun  to- 
wield  the  pen,  by  the  exercises  of  the  copy-book. 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  39! 

elation  of  ideas  ".  Thus  a  child  falls  into  a  stereotyped 
way  of  drawing  the  human  face  and  figure  ;  line  follows 
line  in  the  accustomed  sequence ;  the  only  variation 
showing  itself  is  in  the  insertion  or  omission  of  nose,  ears, 
or  arms  ;  these  uncertainties  being  due  to  fluctuations  of 
energy  and  concentration.  A  child's  art  is,  in  respect  of 
its  unyielding  sameness,  a  striking  example  of  a  conserva- 
tive conventionality.  He  gets  used  to  his  pencil-forms, 
and  pronounces  them  right,  to  the  greater  and  greater 
neglect  of  their  relation  to  natural  forms.  Habit  shows 
itself  in  other  ways  too.  Notice,  for  example,  how  a  child, 
after  adding  the  trunk,  will  go  on  inserting  the  arms  into  the 
head  as  he  used  to  do.  Such  a  habit  is  an  affair  not  only 
of  the  hand  but  of  the  eye.  The  arms  have  by  repeated 
delineation  come  in  the  art-sphere  to  belong  to  the  head. 

Coming  now  to  the  more  elaborate  and  sophisticated 
stage  of  five  or  thereabouts,  in  which  the  shape  of  eyes,  mouth,, 
and  nose  is  shadowed  forth,  the  difficult  appendages  as  hands 
and  feet  attempted,  and  the  profile  aspect  introduced,  we 
notice  first  of  all  a  step  in  the  direction  of  naturalism.  The 
child  like  the  race  gets  tired  of  his  bald  primitive  symbolism, 
and  essays  to  bring  more  of  concrete  fulness  and  life  into 
his  forms.  Only  this  first  attempt  does  not  lead  to  a  con- 
tinued progress,  but  stops  short  at  what  is  rude  and  arbi- 
trary enough,  substituting  merely  a  second  rigid  conven- 
tionalism for  the  first. 

This  transition  indicates  an  advance  in  technical  skill  ; 
hence  we  find  a  measure  of  free  and  bold  invention,  as  in 
the  management  of  the  facial  features,  e.g.,  the  scissors- 
shaped  nose,  and  still  more  in  the  treatment  of  hands  and 
feet,  which  is  at  once  exaggerative,  as  in  the  big  burr 
forms,  and  freely  conventional,  as  in  the  leaf-pattern  for 
the  hand,  and  the  wondrous  loop-designs  for  the  foot. 

Yet  though  this  freer  treatment  shows  a  certain  tech- 
nical advance  it  illustrates  the  effect  of  the  limitations  of 
the  child's  executive  power.  Thus  the  new  partially  pro- 


392 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 


file  figures  are  very  apt  to  lean,  looking  as  if  they  were 
falling  backwards.  It  is  probable  that  the  wide-spread 
tendency  to  make  the  profile  face  look  towards  the  spectator's 
left  rather  than  his  right  is  due  to  the  circumstance  that 
the  eye  can  much  better  follow  and  control  the  pencil  in 
this  case  than  in  the  opposite  one.  In  the  latter  the  hand 
is  apt  to  interfere  with  seeing  the  line  of  the  face,  especially 
if  the  pencil  is  held  near  its  point. 

Habit,  too,  continues  to  assert  its  dominion.  The 
tendency  noticeable  now  and  again,  even  among  English 
children,  to  treat  the  feet  after  the  manner  of  the  hands 
illustrates  this.  Habit  is  further  illustrated  in  the  tendency 
to  a  transference  of  forms  appropriate  to  the  man  to  the 
animal  ;  or,  when  (owing  to  the  interposition  of  the  in- 

structor)the  drawing  of  animals 
is  in  advance  of  the  other,  in 
the  reverse  process  ;  as  when 
a  cat  is  drawn  with  two  legs, 
or  a  horse  is  given  a  man's 
face,  or  the  human  form  de- 
velops a  horse's  ears,  or  a 
bird's  feet.  With  these  may 


Ch 


Man. 


Fig.  52- 


Bird. 


be  compared  the  transference  of  a  bird-like  body  and 
tail  to  a  quadruped  in  Fig.  45  (?'),  p.  377.  The  accompanying 
two  drawings  by  a  child  of  six  show  how  similar  forms  are 
apt  to  be  used  for  the  man  and  for  the  animal  (Fig.  52). 

But  the  really  noticeable  thing  in  this  later  sophisticated 
treatment  is  the  bringing  into  view  of  what  in  the  original 
is  invisible,  as  the  front  view  of  the  eye  as  well  as  both  eyes 
into  what  otherwise  looks  a  side  view  of  the  face,  the  two 
legs  of  the  rider  and  so  forth.  Here,  no  doubt,  we  may  still 
trace  the  influence  of  technical  limitations  and  of  habit.  The 
influence  of  the  former  is  seen  in  the  completing  of  the  con- 
tour of  the  head  before  or  after  drawing  the  hat :  for  the 
child  would  not  know  how  to  start  with  the  lines  which  form 
the  commencement  of  the  visible  part  of  the  head.  The 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  393 

influence  of  habit  is  also  recognisable  here.  A  child  having 
learned  first  of  all  to  draw  the  front  view  of  the  eye,  the 
two  eyes  and  the  two  legs  side  by  side,  tends  partly  as  the 
result  of  organised  hand-trick,  partly  in  consequence  of 
'  association  of  ideas,'  to  go  on  drawing  in  the  same  fashion 
in  the  new  circumstances.  A  specially  clear  illustration  of 
this  effect  of  habit  already  alluded  to  is  the  introduction  of 
the  front  view  of  the  nose  in  the  mixed  scheme.  These 
cases  are  exactly  paralleled  by  the  Egyptian  drawing  in 
which  while  one  shoulder  is  pulled  round  the  other  is  left  in 
square  front  view  (see  above,  p.  369,  Fig.  39  (b}  ).  Still,  habit 
does  not  account  for  everything  here.  It  does  not,  for 
example,  explain  why  the  child  brings  into  view  three  sides 
of  a  house.  The  technical  deficiencies  of  the  small  draughts- 
man, his  want  of  serious  artistic  purpose,  seem  an  insufficient 
explanation  of  these  later  sophistries.  They  appear  to  point 
plainly  to  certain  peculiarities  of  the  process  of  childish 
conception.  We  are  compelled  then  to  inquire  a  little  more 
closely  into  the  characteristics  of  children's  observation 
and  of  their  mental  representation  of  objects. 

We  are  apt  to  think  that  children  when  they  look  at 
things  at  all  scrutinise  them  closely,  and  afterwards  imagine 
clearly  what  they  have  observed.  But  this  assumption  is 
hardly  justified.  No  doubt  they  often  surprise  us  by  their 
attention  to  small  unimportant  details  of  objects,  especially 
when  these  are  new  and  odd-looking.  But  it  is  a  long  way 
from  this  to  a  careful  methodic  investigation  of  objects.  Chil- 
dren's observation  is  for  the  most  part  capriciously  selective 
and  one-sided.  They  apprehend  one  or  two  striking  or 
especially  interesting  features  and  are  blind  to  the  rest. 
This  is  fully  established  in  the  case  of  ordinary  children  by 
the  wondrous  ignorance  they  display  when  questioned  about 
common  objects.  It  is  hardly  necessary  to  add  that  their 
spontaneous  untrained  observation  is  quite  unequal  to  that 
careful  analytical  attention  to  form-elements  in  their 
relations  which  underlies  all  clear  grasp  of  the  direction  of 


394  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

linear  elements,  the  relative  position  of  the  several  parts  of 
a  figure,  and  proportion. 

This  being  so  it  maybe  said  that  defects  of  observation  are 
reflected  in  children's  drawing  through  all  its  phases.  Thus 
the  primitive  bare  schematism  of  the  human  face  answers 
to  an  incomplete  observation  and  consequently  incomplete 
mode  of  imagination,  just  as  it  answers  to  a  want  of  artistic 
purpose  and  to  technical  incapacity.  How  far  defective 
observation  assists  at  this  first  stage  I  do  not  feel  sure. 
Further  experimental  inquiries  are  needed  on  this  point. 
I  lean  to  the  view  already  expressed,  that  at  this  stage 
manual  reproduction  is  far  behind  visual  imagination. 

When,  however,  we  come  on  to  the  delineation  of  an 
object  under  its  different  aspects  the  defects  of  mental 
representation  assume  a  much  graver  character.  We  must 
bear  in  mind  that  a  child  soon  gets  beyond  the  stage  of 
recalling  and  imagining  the  particular  look  of  an  object, 
say  the  front  view  of  his  mother's  face,  or  of  his  house. 
He  begins  as  soon  as  he  understands  and  imitates  others' 
language  to  synthesise  such  pictorial  images  of  particular 
visual  presentations  or  appearances  into  the  wholes  which 
we  call  ideas  of  things.  A  child  of  four  or  five  thinking  of 
his  father  or  his  house  probably  recalls  in  a  confused  way 
disparate  and  incompatible  visual  aspects,  the  front  view 
as  on  the  whole  the  most  impressive  being  predominant, 
though  striking  elements  of  the  side  view  may  rise  into 
consciousness  also.  With  this  process  of  synthesising 
aspects  into  the  concrete  whole  we  call  a  thing  there  goes 
the  further  process  of  binding  together  representations  of 
this  and  that  thing  into  generic  or  typical  ideas  answering 
to  man,  horse,  house,  in  general.  A  child  of  five  or  six,  so 
far  from  being  immersed  in  individual  presentations  and 
concrete  objects,  as  is  often  supposed,  has  carried  out  a 
respectable  measure  of  generalisation,  and  this  largely  by 
the  help  of  language.  Thus  a  '  man '  reduced  to  visual 
terms  has  come  to  mean  for  him  (according  to  his  well-known 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  395 

verbal  formula)  something  with  a  head,  two  eyes,  etc.,  etc., 
which  he  does  not  need  to  represent  in  a  mental  picture 
because  the  verbal  formula  serves  to  connect  the  features 
in  his  memory. 

Hence  when  he  comes  to  draw  he  has  not  the  artist's 
clear  mental  vision  of  the  actual  look  of  things  to  guide 
him.  He  is  led  not  by  a  lively  and  clear  sensuous  imagina- 
tion, but  by  a  mass  of  generalised  knowledge  embodied  in 
words,  viz.,  the  logical  form  of  a  definition  or  description. 
This,  I  take  it,  is  the  main  reason  why  with  such  supreme 
insouciance  he  throws  into  one  design  features  of  the  full 
face  and  of  the  profile ;  for  in  setting  down  his  linear 
scheme  he  is  aiming  not  at  drawing  a  picture,  an  imitative 
representation  of  something  we  could  see,  but  rather  at 
enumerating,  in  the  new  expressive  medium  which  his 
pencil  supplies,  what  he  knows  about  the  particular  thing. 
Since  he  is  thus  bent  on  a  linear  description  of  what  he 
knows  he  is  not  in  the  least  troubled  about  the  laws  of 
visual  appearance,  but  setting  perspective  at  naught  compels 
the  spectator  to  see  the  other  side,  to  look  through  one 
object  at  another,  and  so  forth. 

Since  the  process  at  this  sophisticated  stage  is  controlled 
by  knowledge  of  things  as  wholes  and  not  by  representa- 
tions of  concrete  appearances  or  views,  we  can  understand 
why  the  visible  result  does  not  shock  the  draughtsman. 
The  little  descriptor  does  not  need  to  compare  the  look  of 
his  drawing  with  that  of  the  real  object :  it  is  right  as  a 
description  anyhow.  How  strongly  this  idea  of  description 
controls  his  views  of  pictures  has  already  been  pointed  out. 
Just  as  he  objects  to  a  correct  profile  drawing  as  an  inade- 
quate description,  so  he  objects  to  a  drawing  of  the  hind 
part  of  a  horse  entering  the  stable,  and  asks,  '  Where  is  his 
head  ?  '  We  may  say  then  that  what  a  lively  fancy  did  in 
the  earlier  play-stages  childish  logic  does  now,  it  blinds  the 
artist  to  the  actual  look  of  what  his  pencil  has  created. 

Use  soon  adds   its    magic    force,   and    the   impossible 


396  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

combination,  the  two  eyes  stuck  on  at  the  side  of  the 
profile  nose,  the  two  legs  of  the  rider  untroubled  by  the 
capacious  trunk  of  the  animal  which  he  strides,  the  man 
wholly  exposed  to  view  inside  the  boat  or  carriage,  gets 
stereotyped  into  the  right  mode  of  linear  description. 

All  this  shows  that  the  child's  eye  at  a  surprisingly 
early  period  loses  its  primal  '  innocence,'  grows  '  sophisti- 
cated '  in  the  sense  that  instead  of  seeing  what  is  really- 
presented  it  sees,  or  pretends  to  see,  what  knowledge  and 
logic  tell  it  is  there.  In  other  words  his  sense-perceptions 
have  for  artistic  purposes  become  corrupted  by  a  too  large 
admixture  of  intelligence.  This  corruption  is  closely 
analogous  to  what  we  all  experience  when  we  lose  the 
primal  simplicity  of  the  eye  for  colour,  and  impart  into  our 
'  visual  impressions,'  as  we  call  them,  elements  of  memory 
and  inference,  saying,  for  example,  that  a  distant  mountain 
side  is  'green'  just  because  we  can  make  out  that  it  is 
grass-covered  and  know  that  grass  when  looked  at  nearer  is 
of  a  green  colour. 

I  have  dwelt  on  what  from  our  grown-up  standpoint 
we  must  call  the  defects  of  children's  drawing.  Yet  in 
bringing  this  study  to  a  close  it  is  only  just  to  remark  that 
there  are  other  and  better  qualities  well  deserving  of  re- 
cognition. Crude,  defective,  self-contradictory  even,  as 
these  early  designs  undoubtedly  are,  they  are  not  wholly 
destitute  of  artistic  qualities.  The  abstract  treatment  itself, 
in  spite  of  its  inadequacy,  is  after  all  in  the  direction 
of  a  true  art,  which  in  its  essential  nature  is  selective  and 
suggestive  rather  than  literally  reproductive.  We  may  dis- 
cern, too,even  in  these  rude  schemes  a  nascent  sense  of  values, 
of  a  selection  of  what  is  characteristic.  Even  the  primitive 
trunkless  form  seems  to  illustrate  this,  for  though,  as  we 
have  seen  in  a  previous  essay,  the  trunk  plays  an  important 
part  in  the  development  of  the  idea  of  self,  it  is  for 
pictorial  purposes  less  interesting  and  valuable  than  the 
head.  However  this  be,  it  is  clear  that  we  see  this  impulse 


THE   YOUNG   DRAUGHTSMAN.  397 

of  selection  at  work  later  on  in  the  addition  of  the  buttons, 
the  pipe,  the  stick,  the  parasol  and  so  forth. 

It  is  to  be  noted,  too,  that  even  in  these  untutored 
performances,  where  convention  and  tradition  exercise  so 
great  a  sway,  there  are  faint  indications  of  a  freer  individual 
initiative.  Witness,  for  example,  the  varying  modes  of 
representing  hair,  hands,  and  feet.  We  may  say  then  that 
even  rough  children  in  elementary  schools  who  are  never 
likely  to  develop  artistic  talent  display  a  rudiment  of  art- 
feeling.  It  is  only  fair  to  them  to  testify  that  in  spite  of 
the  limitations  of  their  stiff  wooden  treatment  they  express 
a  certain  individuality  of  feeling  and  aim,  that  like  true 
artists  they  convey  a  personal  impression.  These  traits 
appear  most  plainly  in  the  later  representations  of  action, 
but  they  are  not  altogether  absent  from  the  earlier  statuesque 
figures.  Compare,  for  example,  the  look  of  alert  vigour  in 
Fig.  5  (a)  (p.  339),  of  grinning  impudence  in  Fig.  6  (a) 
(p.  341),  of  provoking  'cheekiness'  in  Fig.  20  (b)  (p.  350), 
of  a  seedy  '  swagger  '  in  Fig.  32  (p.  362),  of  inebriate  gaiety 
in  Fig.  17  (p.  348),  of  absurd  skittishness  in  Fig.  24  (b)  (p. 
354),  of  insane  flurry  in  Fig.  26  (a)  (p.  355),  of  Irish  easy- 
goingness  even  when  somebody  has  to  be  killed  in  Fig.  34 
(p.  363),  of  wiry  resoluteness  in  Fig.  29  (a]  (p.  359),  of  sly 
villainy  in  Fig.  38  (p.  365),  and  of  demure  simplicity  in  Fig. 
26  (c)  (p.  356) ;  and  note  the  delicious  variety  of  equine 
character  in  Fig.  45  (/")  (p.  376)  and  following. 

If  a  finer  aesthetic  feeling  is  developed  the  first  rude 
descriptive  drawing  loses  its  attractions.  A  friend,  a  well- 
known  psychologist,  has  observed  in  the  case  of  his  children 
that  when  they  try  to  draw  something  pretty,  e.g.,  a  beauti- 
ful lady,  they  abandon  their  customary  mode  of  description 
and  become  aware  of  the  look  of  their  designs  and  criticise 
them  as  bad.  This  seems  to  me  a  most  significant  obser- 
vation. It  is  the  feeling  for  what  is  beautiful  which  makes 
a  child  attend  closely  to  the  bare  look  of  things,  and  the 
beginning  of  a  finer  observation  of  forms  commonly  takes 


398  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

its  rise  in  this  nascent  sense  of  beauty.  Indeed,  may  one 
not  say  that  only  when  a  germ  of  the  aesthetic  feeling  for 
beauty  arises,  and  a  child  falls  in  love  with  the  mere  look  of 
certain  things,  can  there  appear  the  beginnings  of  genuinely 
artistic  work,  of  a  conscientious  endeavour  to  render  on 
paper  the  aspect  which  pleases  the  eye  ? 


399 


XI. 

EXTRACTS  FROM  A  FATHER'S  DIARY. 

THERE  has  just  come  into  my  hands  a  curious  document.  It 
is  a  sort  of  diary  kept  by  a  father  in  which  he  chronicles 
certain  of  the  early  doings  and  sayings  of  his  boy.  It  makes 
no  pretence  to  being  a  regular  and  methodical  register  of  pro- 
gress, such  as  Mr.  F.  Galton  has  shown  us  how  to  carry  out. 
It  may  be  said  by  way  of  extenuation  that  the  diary  sets  out  in 
the  year  1880,  that  is  to  say,  two  years  before  Professor  Preyer 
published  his  model  record  of  an  infant's  progress.  En  revanche, 
it  is  manifestly  the  work  of  a  psychologist  given  to  speculation, 
and  this  of  a  somewhat  bold  type.  In  the  present  paper  I 
propose  to  cull  from  this  diary  what  seem  to  me  some  of  the 
choicer  observations  and  comments  on  these.  If  these  do  not 
always  come  up  to  the  requirements  of  a  rigidly  scientific  standard 
in  respect  of  completeness,  precision,  and  grave  impartiality, 
they  may  none  the  less  prove  suggestive  of  serious  scientific 
thought,  while  any  extravagances  of  fancy  and  any  levity  of 
manner  may  well  be  set  down  to  the  play  of  a  humorous 
sentiment,  which  betrays  the  father  beneath  the  observer. 

I  may  begin  my  sketch  of  the  early  history  of  this  boy  by 
remarking  that  he  appears  to  have  been  a  normal  and  satis- 
factory specimen  of  his  class, — healthy,  good-natured,  and 
given  to  that  infantile  way  of  relieving  the  pressure  of  his 
animal  spirits  which  is,  I  believe,  known  as  crowing.  Not 
believing  in  the  classifications  of  temperament  adopted  by  the 
physiologists  of  a  past  age,  the  father  forbears  from  describing 
his  child's.  For  my  lady  readers  I  may  add  that  he  seems,  at 
least  by  his  father's  account,  to  have  been  a  good-sized,  chubby 
little  fellow,  fair  and  rosy  in  tint,  with  bright  blue  eyes,  and  a 


400  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

limited  crop  of  golden  hair  of  an  exceptionally  rich,  I  don't 
know  how  many  carat  gold,  hue.  I  shall  speak  of  him  under 
his  initial,  C. 

First   Year. 

The  early  pages  of  the  record  do  not,  one  must  confess,  yield 
any  very  striking  observations.  This  is,  no  doubt,  due  to  the 
circumstance  that  the  observer,  not  being  a  naturalist,  was  not 
specially  interested  in  the  dim  mindless  life  of  the  first  weeks. 
For  the  first  few  days  Master  C.  appears  to  have  been  content 
to  vegetate  like  other  babies  of  a  similar  age.  Although  a 
bonny  boy,  he  began  life  in  the  usual  way — with  a  good  cry  ; 
though  we  now  know,  on  scientific  authority,  that  this,  being  a 
purely  reflex  act,  has  not  the  deep  significance  which  certain 
pessimistic  philosophers  have  attributed  to  it.  Science  would 
probably  explain  in  a  similar  way  a  number  of  odd  facial  move- 
ments which  this  baby  went  through  on  the  second  day  of  his 
earthly  career,  and  which,  the  father  characteristically  remarks, 
were  highly  suggestive  of  a  cynical  contempt  for  his  new  sur- 
roundings. 

Yet,  though  content  in  this  early  stage  to  do  little  but 
perform  the  vegetal  functions  of  life,  the  infant  comes  endowed 
with  a  nervous  system  and  organs  of  sense,  and  these  are  very 
soon  brought  into  active  play.  According  to  this  record,  the 
sense  of  touch  is  the  first  to  manifest  itself.1  Even  when  only 
two  hours  old,  at  a  period  of  life  when  there  is  certainly  no 
sound  for  the  ear  and  possibly  no  light  for  the  eye,  C.  immedi- 
ately clasped  the  parental  finger  which  was  brought  into  the 
hollow  of  its  tiny  hand.  The  functional  activity  of  touch  was 
observed  still  more  plainly  on  the  second  day,  when  the  child 
was  seen  to  carry  out  awkwardly  enough  what  looked  like 
exploring  movements  of  the  hands  over  his  mouth  and  face. 
This  early  development  in  the  child  of  the  tactual  sense  agrees, 
says  the  biographer,  with  what  Aristotle  long  since  taught  re- 
specting the  fundamental  character  of  this  sense,  an  idea  to 

1  Taste,  as  involved  in  the  necessary  act  of  taking  nourishment, 
is  probably  at  first  hardly  differentiated  from  touch. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  401 

which    the    modern    doctrine    of  evolution    has   given    a    new 
significance. 

A  distinct  step  is  taken  during  the  first  four  days  towards 
acquiring  knowledge  of  things  through  a  progressive  use  of  the 
eyes  and  hands.  C.'s  father  noticed  on  the  second  day  that  a 
good  deal  of  ocular  movement  was  forthcoming.  Much  of  this 
was  quite  irregular,  each  eye  following  its  own  path.  Sometimes, 
however,  the  eyes  moved  harmoniously  or  symmetrically  now 
to  this  side,  now  to  that,  and  now  and  again  seemed  to  con- 
verge and  fix  themselves  on  some  near  object  in  front  of  them. 
Sufficiently  loud  sounds  increased  these  ocular  movements. 

On  the  third  day  the  father,  when  chuckling  and  calling  to 
the  child  at  a  short  distance,  fondly  supposed  that  his  offspring 
showed  appreciation  of  these  attentions  by  regarding  him  with 
a  sweet  expression  and  something  like  the  play  of  a  smile  about 
the  lips  and  eyelids.  But  it  is  possible  that  this  apparent 
amiability  was  nothing  but  a  purely  animal  satisfaction  after  a 
good  meal.  As  to  seeing  his  father's  face  at  that  early  age, 
there  is  room  for  serious  doubt.  Preyer  found  that  long  before 
the  close  of  the  first  day  his  child  wore  a  different  expression 
when  his  face,  turned  towards  the  window,  was  suddenly  de- 
prived of  light  by  the  intervention  of  the  professor's  hand.  If 
the  child  is  thus  sensible  to  the  pleasure  of  light  it  is,  of  course, 
conceivable  that  C.'s  eyes,  happening  in  their  aimless  wander- 
ings to  be  brought  together  opposite  the  bright  patch  of  the 
father's  face,  might  maintain  that  attitude  under  the  stimulus 
of  the  pleasure.  The  father  argues  in  favour  of  this  view  by 
quoting  the  fact  that  C.'s  sister  was  observed  on  the  fourth  day 
to  have  her  eyes  arrested  by  a  light  or  the  father's  face  if  brought 
pretty  near  the  child  ;  yet  such  blank  staring  at  mere  brightness 
is,  of  course,  a  long  way  off  from  distinct  vision  of  an  object. 

On  the  fourth  day,  continues  the  sanguine  father,  the  child 
showed  a  distinct  advance  in  the  use  of  the  hands.  Having 
clasped  his  sire's  finger  he  now  moved  it  in  what  looked  like 
an  abortive  attempt  to  carry  it  to  his  mouth.  There  follow 
some  remarks  on  the  impulse  of  infants  to  carry  objects  to 
their  mouths,  in  which  again  there  seems  an  approach  to 
frivolity  in  the  conjecture  that  the  human  animal  previous  to 

26 


402  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

education  is  all-devouring.  It  is  to  be  noted,  however,  that 
these  early  movements  are  probably  quite  accidental.  As  we 
shall  see,  it  is  some  weeks  before  the  child  learns  to  carry 
objects  to  his  mouth.  As  to  the  connexion  between  this 
movement  and  infantile  greed  our  observer  is  not  so  poor  a 
psychologist  as  not  to  see  that  it  may  be  due  to  the  circum- 
stance that  the  lips  and  the  tip  of  the  tongue  form  one  of 
the  most  delicate  parts  of  the  tactual  organ.  It  is  not  im- 
probable that  in  the  evolution  of  man  before  the  tactual  sensi- 
bility of  the  hand  was  developed  these  parts  were  chiefly 
employed  as  a  tactual  apparatus  in  distinguishing  and  rejecting 
what  is  hard,  gritty  and  so  forth  in  food.  However  this  be,  it 
is  probable  that,  as  Stanley  Hall  has  suggested,  an  infant  may 
get  a  kind  of  "aesthetic"  pleasure  by  bringing  objects  into 
contact  with  the  lips  and  the  gums. 

At  this  period,  the  diary  remarks,  the  child  was  very  cross 
for  some  weeks  and  not  a  good  subject  for  observation.  This 
new  difficulty,  added  to  that  of  overcoming  natural  scruples  in 
his  guardians,  appears  to  have  baffled  the  observer  for  a  time, 
for  the  next  observations  recorded  take  up  the  thread  of  the 
child's  history  at  the  sixth  week. 

About  this  date,  the  father  notes,  the  power  of  directing 
the  eyes  had  greatly  improved.  The  child  could  now  converge 
his  eyes  comfortably  and  without  going  through  a  number  of 
unpleasant  squinting-like  failures  on  a  near  object.  The  range 
of  sight  had  greatly  increased,  so  that  the  boy's  universe,  instead 
of  consisting  merely  of  a  tiny  circle  of  near  objects,  as  his 
mother's  face  held  close  to  him,  began  to  embrace  distant 
objects,  as  the  clock,  the  window,  and  so  forth.  He  was  observed, 
too,  to  carry  out  more  precise  movements  of  the  head  and  eyes 
in  correspondence  with  the  direction  of  sounds.  This  ability 
to  look  towards  the  direction  of  a  sound  is  an  important  attain- 
ment as  implying  that  the  infant  mind  has  now  come  to  learn 
that  things  may  exist  when  not  actually  seen. 

This  new  command  of  the  visual  apparatus  led  to  a  marked 
increase  in  observation.  The  boy  may  indeed  be  said  to  have 
begun  about  this  date  something  like  a  serious  scrutiny  of 
objects.  Like  other  children  he  was  greatly  attracted  by 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  403 

brightly  coloured  objects.  When  just  seven  weeks  old  he 
acquired  a  fondness  for  a  cheap  showy  card  with  crudely 
brilliant  colouring  and  gilded  border.  When  carried  to  the 
place  where  it  hung,  above  the  glass  over  the  fire-place, 
he  would  look  up  to  it  and  greet  his  first-love  in  the  world  of 
art  with  a  pretty  smile.  By  the  ninth  or  tenth  week,  the  father 
adds,  he  began  to  notice  the  pattern  of  the  wall-paper  and  the 
like. 

In  these  growing  intervals  of  observation  between  the 
discharge  of  the  vegetal  functions  of  feeding  and  sleeping,  C. 
was  observed  to  examine  not  only  any  foreign  object,  such  as 
his  mamma's  dress,  which  happened  to  be  within  sight,  but 
also  the  visible  parts  of  his  own  organism.  In  the  ninth  week 
of  his  existence  he  was  first  surprised  in  the  act  of  surveying 
his  own  hands.  Why  he  should  at  this  particular  moment 
have  woke  up  to  the  existence  of  objects  which  had  all  along 
lain  within  easy  reach  of  the  eye,  is  a  question  which  has 
evidently  greatly  exercised  the  father's  ingenuity.  He  hints, 
but  plainly  in  a  half-hearted,  sceptical  way,  at  a  possible  dim 
recognition  by  the  little  contemplator  of  the  fact  that  these 
objects  belong  to  himself,  forming,  indeed,  the  outlying  portion 
of  the  Ego.  He  also  asks  (and  here  he  seems  to  grow  positively 
frivolous)  whether  the  child  is  taking  after  the  somewhat 
extravagant  ways  of  his  mother  and  beginning  to  dote  on  the 
exquisite  modelling  of  his  tiny  members. 

Psychologists  are  now  agreed  that  our  knowledge  of  the 
properties  of  material  objects  is  largely  obtained  by  what  they 
call  active  touch,  that  is,  by  moving  the  hands  over  objects  and 
exploring  the  space  around  them.  This  is  borne  out  by  the 
observations  made  on  C.  at  this  period  of  his  existence.  While 
viewing  things  about  him  he  actively  manipulated  them.  The 
organs  of  sight  and  touch  worked  indeed  in  the  closest  con- 
nexion. Thus  our  little  visitor  was  no  mere  passive  spectator 
of  his  new  habitat ;  he  actively  took  possession  of  his  sur- 
roundings :  like  the  Roman  general,  he  at  once  saw  and  con- 
quered. From  the  eighth  to  the  tenth  week  his  manual 
performances  greatly  improved  in  quality.  He  was  rapidly 
learning  to  carry  the  organ  of  touch  to  the  point  of  which  his 


404  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

eye  told  him.  An  account  of  his  progress  in  reaching  objects 
may  however  be  postponed  till  we  come  to  speak  of  the  develop- 
ment of  his  active  powers. 

The  growing  habit  of  looking  at,  reaching  out  to,  and 
manually  investigating  objects,  soon  leads  to  the  accumula- 
tion of  a  store  of  materials  for  the  construction  of  those  complex 
mental  products  which  we  call  perceptions.  And  often-repeated 
perceptions,  when  they  become  more  clearly  distinguished, 
supply  the  basis  of  definite  acts  of  recognition.  The  first 
object  that  is  clearly  recognised  through  a  special  act  of  atten- 
tion is,  of  course,  the  face  of  the  mother.  In  the  case  of  C., 
the  father's  face  was  apparently  recognised  about  the  eighth 
week — at  least,  the  youngster  first  greeted  his  parent  with  a 
smile  about  this  time — an  event,  I  need  hardly  say,  which  is 
recorded  in  very  large  and  easily  legible  handwriting.  The  oc- 
currence gives  rise  to  a  number  of  odd  reflexions  in  the  parental 
mind.  The  observer's  belief  in  the  necessary  co-operation  of 
sight  and  touch  in  the  early  knowledge  of  material  objects  leads 
him  to  remark  that  C.'s  manual  experience  of  his  face,  and  more 
particularly  of  the  bearded  chin,  has  been  extensive — an  experi- 
ence which,  he  adds,  has  left  its  recollection  in  his  own  mind,  too, 
in  the  shape  of  a  certain  soreness.  He  then  goes  on  to  con- 
sider the  meaning  of  the  smile.  "  I  cannot,"  he  writes,  "  be  of 
any  interest  to  him  as  a  psychological  student  of  his  ways. 
No,  it  must  be  in  the  light  of  a  bearded  plaything  that  he  regards 
my  face."  Further  observation  bears  out  this  argument  by 
going  to  show  that  the  recognition  was  not  individual  but  specific : 
that  it  was  simply  a  recognition  of  one  of  a  class  of  bearded 
people ;  for  when  a  perfect  stranger  also  endowed  with  the 
entertaining  appendage  presented  himself,  C.  wounded  his 
father's  heart  by  smiling  at  him  in  exactly  the  same  way.  Here 
the  diary  goes  off  into  some  abstruse  speculations  about  the  first 
mental  images  being  what  Mr.  Galton  calls  generic  images — 
speculations  into  which  we  need  not  follow  the  writer.  As  we 
shall  see,  the  father  takes  up  the  subject  of  childish  generalisa- 
tion more  fully  later  on.  The  power  of  recognising  objects 
appeared  to  undergo  rapid  development  towards  the  end  of  the 
fourth  month.  The  father  remarks  that  the  child  would  about 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  405 

this  time  recognise  him  in  a  somewhat  dark  room  at  a  distance 
of  three  or  four  yards.1 

The  germ  of  true  imagination,  of  the  formation  of  what 
Hoffding  calls  a  free  or  detached  image  of  something  not  seen 
at  the  moment,  appeared  about  the  same  time.  The  moment 
when  the  baby's  mind  first  passes  on  from  the  sight  of  his  bottle 
to  a  foregrasping  or  imagination  of  the  blisses  of  prehension 
and  deglutition — a  moment  which  appears  to  have  been  reached 
by  C.  in  his  tenth  week — marks  an  epoch  in  his  existence. 
He  not  only  perceives  what  is  actually  present  to  his  senses, 
he  pictures  or  represents  what  is  absent.  This  is  the  moment 
at  which,  to  quote  from  the  parent's  somewhat  high-flown 
observations  on  this  event,  "  mind  rises  above  the  limitations 
of  the  actual,  and  begins  to  shape  for  itself  an  ideal  world  of 
possibilities". 

This  rise  of  the  ideal  to  take  the  place  of  the  real  appeared 
in  other  ways  too.  Thus  when  just  eighteen  weeks  old  the 
child  had  been  lying  on  his  nurse's  lap  and  gazing  on  some 
pictures  on  the  wall  of  which  he  was  getting  fond.  The  nurse 
happening  to  turn  round  suddenly  put  an  end  to  his  happiness. 
Still  the  child  was  not  to  be  done,  but  immediately  began  twist- 
ing his  head  back  in  order  to  bring  the  pictures  once  more 
into  his  field  of  view.  Here  we  have  an  illustration  of  a 
mental  image  appearing  immediately  after  a  perception,  a  rude 
form  of  what  psychologists  are  now  getting  to  call  a  primary 
memory-image. 

The  expression  of  the  gourmet's  delight  at  the  sight  of  the 
bottle  (tenth  week)  involves  a  simple  process  of  association. 
Between  the  ages  of  five  and  six  months  the  child's  progress 
in  building  up  associations  was  very  marked.  Thus  he  would 
turn  from  a  reflexion  of  the  fire  on  the  glass  of  a  picture  to  the 
fire  itself,  and  a  little  later  would  look  towards  a  particular 
picture,  Cherry  Ripe,  when  the  name  was  uttered.  Further, 
not  only  had  he  now  learnt  to  connect  the  sight  of  the  bottle 
with  the  joys  of  a  repast,  but  on  seeing  the  basin  in  which  his 

1  The  clear  recognition  of  individual  objects  is  said  to  show 
itself  in  average  cases  from  about  the  sixth  month  (Tracy,  op.  cit., 
pp.  15-16). 


406  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

food  is  prepared  he  would  glance  towards  the  cupboard  where 
the  bottle  is  kept. 

The  diary  contains  but  few  observations  on  the  growth  of  the 
power  of  understanding  things  and  reasoning  about  them  during 
the  first  year.  One  of  the  most  interesting  of  these  relates  to  the 
understanding  of  reflexions,  shadows,  etc.  We  know  that  these 
things  played  a  considerable  part  in  the  development  of  the  first 
racial  ideas  of  the  supernatural,  and  we  might  expect  to  see  them 
producing  an  impression  on  the  child's  mind.  C.  when  he  first 
began  to  notice  reflexions  of  the  fire  and  other  objects  in  a 
mirror  showed  considerable  marks  of  surprise.  What  quaint 
fancies  he  may  have  had  respecting  this  odd  doubling  of  things 
we  cannot  of  course  say.  What  is  certain  is  that  he  distinctly 
connected  the  reflexion  with  the  original,  as  is  shown  by  the 
fact  already  mentioned,  his  turning  from  the  first  to  the  second. 
By  the  end  of  the  sixth  month  the  marks  of  surprise  had 
visibly  lessened,  so  that  the  child  was  apparently  getting  used 
to  the  miracle,  even  though  he  could  not  as  yet  be  said  to 
understand  it.  It  is  worth  notice  that  though  the  experiment 
of  showing  him  his  own  reflexion  was  repeated  again  and  again 
he  remained  apparently  quite  indifferent  to  the  image.  Per- 
haps, suggests  the  father,  he  did  not  as  yet  know  himself  as 
visible  object  sufficiently  to  recognise  nature's  portrait  of  him 
in  the  glass. 

The  above  may  perhaps  serve  as  a  sample  of  the  observa- 
tions made  on  the  intellectual  development  of  this  privileged 
child  during  the  first  year  of  his  earthly  existence.  I  will  now 
pass  on  to  quote  a  remark  or  two  on  his  emotional  develop- 
ment. I  may  add  that  the  record  of  this  phase  of  the  boy's 
early  mental  life  is  certainly  the  most  curious  part  of  the 
document,  containing  many  odd  speculations  on  the  course  of 
primitive  human  history. 

The  earliest  manifestations  of  the  life  of  feeling  are  the 
elemental  forms  of  pain  and  pleasure,  crying  and  incipient 
laughing  in  the  form  of  the  smile.1  In  C.'s  case,  as  in  others, 
crying  of  the  genuine  miserable  kind  preceded  smiling  by  a 

1  With  the  smile  there  ought  perhaps  to  be  taken  the  infantile 
crow. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  407 

considerable  interval.  The  child,  remarks  our  observer,  seems 
to  need  to  learn  to  smile,  whereas  his  crying  apparatus  is  in 
good  working  order  from  the  first. 

The  growth  of  the  smile  is  a  curious  chapter  in  child- 
psychology,  and  has  been  carefully  worked  out  by  Preyer.  The 
observations  on  C.  under  this  head  are  incomplete.  The 
father  thought  he  detected  an  attempt  at  a  smile  on  the  third 
day,  when  the  child  was  lying  replete  with  food,  in  answer  to 
certain  chuckling  sounds  with  which  he  sought  to  amuse  him. 
The  movements  constituting  this  quasi-smile  are  said  to  have 
been  the  following :  a  drawing  in  of  the  under  lip  ;  a  drawing 
inwards  and  backwards  of  the  corners  of  the  mouth  :  increase 
of  oblique  line  from  the  corner  of  the  mouth  upwards ;  and  a 
furrowing  or  ridging  of  the  eyelids.  It  is  probable,  however, 
that  this  was  not  a  true  smile,  i.e.,  an  expression  of  pleasure. 
He  remarks,  moreover,  that  in  the  case  of  the  child's  sister  the 
first  approach  to  a  smile  was  not  observed  before  the  tenth  day, 
this,  too,  by-the-bye,  in  that  state  of  blissful  complaisance  which 
follows  a  good  meal.  It  may  be  added  that  in  the  case  of  the 
brother,  too,  the  smile  seems  to  have  grown  noticeably  bright 
and  significant  about  the  same  time  (eighth  to  tenth  week). 
At  this  stage  the  boy  expressed  his  pleasure  at  seeing  his 
father's  face  not  only  by  a  "bright"  smile,  but  by  certain 
cooing  sounds.  At  the  same  date  a  playful  touch  on  the 
child's  cheek  was  sufficient  to  provoke  a  smile.1 

Very  early  in  the  infant's  course  the  germs  of  some  of  our 
most  characteristic  human  feelings  begin  to  appear.  One  of 
the  earliest  is  anger,  which  though  common  to  man  and 
many  of  the  higher  animals,  takes  on  a  peculiar  form  in 
his  case.  Angry  revolt  against  the  order  of  things  showed 
itself  early  in  C.'s  case  as  in  that  of  his  sister,  the  occasion 
being  in  each  instance  a  momentary  difficulty  in  seizing  the 
means  of  appeasing  appetite.  It  is  of  course  difficult  to  say 
at  what  moment  the  mere  vexation  of  disappointment  passes 
into  true  wrath,  but  in  this  boy's  case  the  father  is  compelled 

1  Darwin  puts  the  first  true  smile  on  the  forty-fifth  day.  The 
first  ^jmsz-smiles  are  probably  quite  mechanical  and  destitute  of 
meaning. 


408  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

to  admit  that  the  ugly  emotion  displayed  itself  distinctly  by  the 
third  week. 

To  detect  the  first  clear  signs  of  a  humane  feeling,  of  kind- 
liness and  sympathy,  is  still  more  difficult.  Reference  has 
already  been  made  to  the  signs  of  pleasure,  the  smile  and  the 
cooing  sounds,  which  C.  manifested  at  the  sight  of  his  father's 
face.  About  the  same  time,  viz. ,  the  ninth  and  tenth  weeks, 
he  began  to  show  himself  particularly  responsive  to  soothing 
sounds.  The  impulse  to  imitate  soft  low  sounds  was  of  great 
service  in  checking  his  misery.  When  utterly  broken  by  grief 
he  would  often  pull  himself  together  if  appealed  to  by  the 
right  soothing  sound  and  join  in  a  short  plaintive  duet.  Such 
responses  like  the  early  imitative  smile  may,  it  is  true, 
be  nothing  but  a  mechanical  imitation,  destitute  of  any  emotive 
significance.  It  is  probable,  however,  that  the  first  crude  form 
of  fellow-feeling,  of  the  impulse  to  accept  and  to  give  sympathy 
in  joy  and  grief,  takes  its  rise  in  such  simple  imitative  move- 
ments. The  first  advance  to  signs  of  a  truer  fellow-feeling 
was  made  when  the  child  was  six  and  a  half  months  old.  His 
father  pretended  to  cry.  Thereupon  C.  bent  his  head  down  so 
that  his  chin  touched  his  breast  and  began  to  paw  his  father's 
face,  very  much  after  the  manner  of  a  dog  in  a  fit  of  tenderness. 
Oddly  enough,  adds  the  chronicler,  there  was  no  trace  of  sadness 
in  the  child's  face.  The  experiment  was  repeated  and  always 
with  a  like  result.  A  smile  on  the  termination  of  the  crying 
completed  the  curious  little  play.  Who  would  venture  to 
interpret  that  falling  of  the  head  and  that  caressing  movement 
of  the  hand  ?  The  father  saw  here  something  of  a  divine  ten- 
derness;  and  I  am  not  disposed  to  question  his  interpretation. 

Emotion  soon  begins  to  manifest  itself,  too,  in  connexion 
with  the  child's  peerings  into  his  new  world.  As  the  little  brain 
grows  stronger  and  the  organs  of  sense  come  under  better 
management,  the  child  spends  more  time  in  examining  things, 
and  this  examination  is  accompanied  by  a  profound  wonder. 
C.  would  completely  lose  himself  in  marvelling  at  some  new 
mystery,  as  the  face  of  a  clock,  to  which  he  appeared 
to  talk  as  to  something  alive,  or  the  play  of  the  sunlight  on 
the  wall  of  his  room  ;  and  the  closeness  of  his  attention  was 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  409 

indicated  by  the  occurrence  of  a  huge  sigh  when  the  strain  was 
over. 

The  directions  of  this  early  childish  attention  are,  as  in  the 
example  of  the  clock  and  the  sunlight,  towards  what  has  some 
attraction  of  brightness,  or  other  stimulating  quality.  The  fas- 
cination of  bright  colour  for  C.  has  already  been  referred  to. 
Sounds,  too,  very  soon  began  to  capture  his  attention  and  hold  it 
spellbound.  Thus  it  is  recorded  that  in  the  tenth  week  the 
sound  produced  by  striking  a  wine-glass  excited  an  agreeable 
wonder.  The  sound  of  the  piano,  by-the-bye,  made  him  cry 
the  first  time  he  heard  it,  presumably  because  it  was  strange 
and  disconcertingly  voluminous.  But  he  soon  got  to  like  it, 
and  his  mother  remarked  that  when  his  father  played  the  child 
seemed  to  grow  heavier  in  her  lap,  as  if  all  his  muscles  were 
relaxed  in  a  delicious  self-abandonment.1 

Certain  things  became  favourite  objects  of  this  quasi -aesthetic 
contemplation.  When  six  weeks  old  the  child  got  into  the 
way  of  taking  special  note  of  one  or  two  rather  showy  coloured 
pictures  on  the  wall.  In  these  it  seemed  to  be  partly  the  bright- 
ness of  colouring  in  the  picture  or  the  frame,  partly  the  re- 
flexions of  objects  in  the  glass  covering,  which  attracted  him. 
Other  things  which  appeared  to  give  him  repeated  and  endless 
enjoyment  of  a  quiet  sort  were  the  play  of  sunlight  and  of 
shadow  on  the  walls  of  his  room,  the  reflexion  of  the  shoot- 
ing fire-flame  sent  back  by  the  window-pane  or  the  glass 
covering  of  a  picture,  the  swaying  of  trees,  and  the  like.  He 
soon  got  to  know  the  locality  of  some  of  his  favourite  works 
of  art,  and  to  look  out  expectantly,  when  taken  into  the  right 
room,  for  his  daily  show. 

Yet  the  new  does  not  always  awaken  this  pleasurable 
admiration.  The  child's  organism  soon  begins  to  adapt 
itself  to  what  is  customary,  and  sudden  departures  from  the 
usual  order  of  things  come  as  a  shock,  jar  the  nerves,  and 
produce  the  first  crude  form  of  fear.  C.'s  sensitiveness  to  the 
disturbing  effect  of  new  and  loud  sounds  has  been  referred  to 
in  speaking  of  the  first  impression  of  the  piano.  A  strong  wind 
making  uproar  in  the  trees  quite  upset  him  when  he  was  about 

1  See  above,  p.  195  and  p.  308. 


410  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

five  months  old,  though  he  soon  got  over  his  dislike  and  would 
laugh  at  the  wind  even  when  it  blew  cold.  In  like  manner  he 
appeared  to  be  much  put  out  by  the  voices  of  strangers, 
especially  when  these  were  loud.  A  similar  effect  of  shock 
showed  itself  when  something  in  the  familiar  scene  was  suddenly 
transmuted.  For  example,  when  just  twelve  weeks  old,  he  was 
quite  upset  by  his  mother  donning  a  red  jacket  in  place  of  the 
usual  flower- spotted  dress.  He  was  just  proceeding  to  take  his 
breakfast  when  he  noticed  the  change,  at  the  discovery  of  which 
all  thoughts  of  feasting  deserted  him,  his  lips  quivered,  and  he 
only  became  reassured  of  his  whereabouts  after  taking  a  good 
look  at  his  mother's  face. 

This  clinging  to  the  familiar  and  alarm  at  a  sudden  intrusion 
of  the  new  into  his  little  world  showed  themselves  in  a  curious 
way  in  his  attitude  towards  strangers.  When  ten  weeks  old 
he  would  still  greet  new  faces  with  a  gracious  smile.  But  this 
amiable  disposition  soon  underwent  a  change.  When  he  began 
to  discriminate  people  one  from  another  and  to  single  out 
particular  faces,  those  of  the  mother,  father,  sister,  etc.,  as 
familiar,  he  took  up  what  looked  like  a  less  hospitable  attitude 
towards  strangers.  By  the  fifteenth  week  he  no  longer  greeted 
their  advent  with  his  welcoming  smile.  A  month  later  the 
diary  chronicles  a  new  development  of  timidity.  He  now  turned 
away  from  a  stranger  with  all  the  signs  of  shrinking.1 

That  this  repugnance  to  the  new  depends  on  a  kind  of 
shock-like  effect  on  the  nervous  system  seems  to  be  borne  out 
by  the  fact  that  the  same  object  would  produce  now  joyous 
admiration,  now  something  indistinguishable  from  fear,  accord- 
ing to  the  boy's  varying  condition  of  health  and  spirits. 

Changes  of  sentiment  analogous  to  those  which  marked  his 
behaviour  towards  strangers  occurred  in  his  treatment  of  in- 
animate objects.  For  instance,  a  not  very  alarming-looking 
doll  belonging  to  his  sister,  after  having  been  a  pleasant  object 
of  regard,  suddenly  acquired  for  him,  when  he  was  nearly  five 
months  old,  a  repulsive  aspect.  Instead  of  talking  to  it  and 
making  a  sort  of  amiable  deity  of  it  as  heretofore,  he  now 
shrieked  when  it  was  brought  near.  There  seems  to  have  been 

1  Compare  what  was  said  above,  p.  201. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  4!  I 

nothing  in  his  individual  experience  which  could  account  for 
this  sudden  accession  of  fear. 

These  observations  led  C.'s  father  to  some  characteristic 
speculations  as  to  the  inheritance  of  certain  feelings.  Thus 
he  hints  that  the  eerie  sort  of  interest  taken  by  his  child  in  the 
reflexions  of  things  in  the  glass  may  be  a  survival  of  the 
primitive  feeling  of  awe  for  the  ghosts  of  things  which  certain 
anthropologists  tell  us  was  first  developed  in  connexion  with 
the  phenomena  of  reflected  images  and  shadows.  He  goes  on 
to  ask  whether  the  fear  called  forth  by  the  doll  and  the  face 
of  strangers  at  a  certain  stage  of  the  child's  development  is 
not  clearly  due  to  an  instinct  now  fixed  in  the  race  by  the 
countless  experiences  of  peril  in  its  early,  pre-social,  and 
Ishmaelitic  condition.  But  here,  too,  perhaps,  his  speculations 
appear,  in  the  light  of  what  has  been  said  above,  a  little  wild. 

Among  other  feelings  displayed  by  the  child  was  that  of 
amusement  at  what  is  grotesque  and  comical.  When  between 
four  and  five  months  old  he  was  accustomed  to  watch  the  antics 
of  his  sister,  an  elfish  being  given  to  flying  about  the  room, 
screaming,  and  other  disorderly  proceedings,  with  all  the  signs 
of  a  sense  of  the  comicality  of  the  spectacle.  So  far  as  the 
father  could  judge,  this  sister  served  as  a  kind  of  jester  to  the 
baby  monarch.  He  would  take  just  that  distant,  good-natured 
interest  in  her  foolings  that  Shakespeare's  sovereigns  took  in 
the  eccentric  unpredictable  ways  of  their  jesters.  The  sense 
of  the  droll  became  still  more  distinctly  marked  at  six  months. 
About  this  date  the  child  delighted  in  pulling  his  sister's 
hair,  and  her  shrieks  would  send  him  into  a  fit  of  laughter. 
Among  other  provocatives  of  laughter  at  this  time  were  sudden 
movements  of  one's  head,  a  rapid  succession  of  sharp  staccato 
sounds  from  one's  vocal  organ  (when  these  were  not  disconcert- 
ing by  their  violence),  and  of  course  sudden  reappearances  of 
one's  head  after  hiding  in  the  game  of  bo-peep.1 

It  is  hardly  necessary  to  follow  the  diary  into  its  record 

1  Darwin  tells  us  that  his  boy  uttered  a  rude  kind  of  laugh 
when  only  one  hundred  and  ten  days  old,  after  a  pinafore  had 
been  thrown  over  his  head  and  suddenly  withdrawn.  C.'s  sense  of 
humour  was  hardly  as  precocious  as  this. 


- 
412  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

of  the  first  stirrings  of  what  psychologists  used  to  call  the 
Will  (with  capital  W  of  course).  If  a  baby  in  the  first  months 
can  be  said  to  have  a  will  in  any  sense  it  must  be  that  un- 
conscious metaphysical  "  will  to  live  "  about  which  we  have 
recently  heard  so  much.  On  the  other  hand  it  is  certainly 
true  that  the  child  manifests  in  the  first  weeks  certain  active 
impulses,  the  working  out  of  which  leads  in  about  four  months 
to  the  acquisition  of  the  power  of  carrying  out  movements 
for  a  purpose.  Reference  has  already  been  made  to  this 
progress  in  motor  activity  when  speaking  of  the  senses.  It 
may  suffice  to  add  one  or  two  further  observations. 

The  father  remarks  that  about  the  end  of  the  ninth  week 
there  was  a  vigorous  use  of  the  muscles  of  the  arms  and  hands 
in  aimless  movement.  This  superabundance  of  muscular 
activity  is  important,  as  giving  children  the  chance  of  finding 
out  the  results  of  their  movements.  C.  was  just  ten  and  a 
half  weeks  old  when  he  first  showed  himself  capable  lying 
on  his  back  of  turning  his  head  to  the  side,  and  even  of  half 
turning  his  body  also,  in  order  to  have  a  good  view  of  his 
father  moving  away  to  a  distant  part  of  the  room. 

About  the  same  date,  too,  purposive  movements  began  to 
be  clearly  differentiated  from  expressive  movements ;  such,  for 
example,  as  the  quick  energetic  movement  of  the  limbs  when 
excited  by  pleasure.  For  instance,  on  the  seventy-second  day 
the  father  was  surprised  and  delighted  to  see  the  boy  add  to 
the  usual  signs  of  joy  at  his  approach  the  movement  of  leaning 
forward  and  holding  out  the  arms  as  if  to  try  to  get  near. 
Was  this,  he  asks,  the  sudden  emergence  of  an  unlearnt  instinct, 
or  was  it  an  imitation  in  baby  fashion  of  his  elders'  behaviour 
when  they  took  possession  of  him  ? 

The  gradual  growth  of  a  voluntary  movement  into  a 
perfect  artistic  action  nicely  adjusted  to  some  desired  end  was 
strikingly  illustrated  in  the  boy's  mastery  of  the  grasping 
movement,  the  movement  of  stretching  out  the  hand  to  seize 
an  object  seen.  On  the  seventy-sixth  day,  the  father  writes, 
he  had  carefully  watched  to  see  whether  the  child  could 
voluntarily  direct  his  hand  to  an  object.  He  had  tried  him  by 
holding  before  him  attractive  objects,  as  a  bit  of  coloured  rag 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  413 

or  his  hand,  which  he  would  regard  very  attentively.  For 
the  last  week  or  ten  days  he  had  been  very  observant  of 
objects,  including  his  own  hands. 

Among  the  objects  that  attracted  him  was  his  mamma's 
dress,  which  had  a  dark  ground  with  a  small  white  flower 
pattern.  On  this  memorable  day  his  hand  accidentally  came 
in  contact  with  one  of  the  folds  of  her  dress  lying  over  the 
breast.  Immediately,  it  seemed  to  strike  him  for  the  first  time 
that  he  could  reach  an  object,  and  for  a  dozen  times  or  more  he 
repeated  the  movement  of  stretching  out  his  hand,  clutching  the 
fold  and  giving  it  a  good  pull,  very  much  to  his  own  satisfaction. 

A  hasty  reasoner  might  easily  suppose  that  the  child  had 
now  learnt  to  reach  out  to  an  object  when  only  seen.  But  the 
sequel  showed  that  this  was  not  the  case.  Four  weeks  later 
the  diary  observes  that  the  child  as  yet  made  no  attempt  to 
grasp  an  object  offered  to  him  (although  there  were  manifest 
attempts  to  uncover  the  mother's  breast).  The  clutching  at  the 
dress  was  thus  a  blind  movement  due  to  the  stimulus  of 
pleasurable  elation.  Yet  it  was  doubtless  a  step  in  the  process 
of  learning  to  grasp. 

The  next  advance  registered  occurred  when  the  boy  was  a 
little  over  four  months  old.  He  would  now  bring  his  two 
hands  together  just  above  the  level  of  his  eyes  and  then 
gaze  on  them  attentively,  striking  out  one  arm  straight  in  front 
of  him,  and  upwards  almost  vertically,  as  if  he  were  trying  some 
new  gymnastic  exercises,  while  he  accompanied  each  move- 
ment with  his  eye,  and  showed  the  deepest  interest  in  what  he 
was  doing.  By  such  exercises,  we  may  suppose,  he  was 
exploring  space  with  hand  and  eye  conjointly  and  noting  the 
correspondences  between  looking  in  a  given  direction  and 
bringing  his  hand  into  the  line  of  sight. 

The  next  noticeable  advance  occurred  at  the  end  of  the 
nineteenth  week.  The  boy's  father  held  a  biscuit  (the  value 
of  which  was  already  known)  just  below  his  face  and  well 
within  his  reach.  There  was  a  very  earnest  look  and  then  a 
series  of  rapid  jerky  movements  of  the  hands.  These  were 
uncertain  at  first,  but  on  repetition  of  the  experiment  soon 
grew  more  precise.  At  first  the  biscuit  was  dropped  (the  child 


4H  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

had  not  yet  learnt  to  handle  things).  But  after  repeated  trials 
he  managed  to  hold  on  to  the  treasure  and  bear  it  triumphantly 
to  his  mouth.  The  discover}7  of  the  new  delight  of  thus  feed- 
ing himself  led  to  more  violent  efforts  to  seize  the  biscuit 
when  presented  again.  Indeed,  the  youngster's  impatience 
led  him  to  reach  forward  with  the  upper  part  of  his  body  so 
as  to  seize  the  biscuit  with  his  mouth.  It  may  be  added  here 
as  throwing  light  on  the  carrying  of  the  biscuit  to  the  mouth 
that  the  child  had  before  this  acquired  considerable  facility  in 
raising  his  hand  to  his  mouth  and  to  the  region  of  his  head 
generally.  Thus  he  had  been  noticed  to  scratch  his  head  with 
a  comical  look  of  sage  reflexion  when  he  was  fifteen  weeks  old. 
The  consummation  of  the  act  of  seizing  an  object  involving 
a  perception  of  distance  was  observed  when  he  was  just  six 
months  old.  The  father  writes :  "  I  held  an  object  in  front 
of  him  two  or  three  inches  beyond  his  reach.  The  astute 
little  fellow  made  no  movement.  I  then  gradually  brought 
it  closer,  and  when  it  came  within  his  reach  he  held  out  his 
hand  and  grasped  it.  I  repeated  the  experiment  with  slight 
variations,  and  satisfied  myself  that  he  could  now  distinguish 
with  some  degree  of  precision  the  near  and  the  far,  the  attain- 
able and  the  unattainable,  that  his  eyes  could  now  inform  him 
by  what  Bishop  Berkeley  called  visual  language  of  the  exact 
limit,  the  '  Ultima  Thule '  of  his  tangible  world."  It  is  natural, 
no  doubt,  that  the  father  should  go  off  into  another  high  flight 
here.  But  being  a  psychologist  he  might  have  moderated  his 
parental  elation  by  reflecting  that  his  wonderful  boy  had  after 
all  taken  six  months  to  learn  what  a  chick  seems  to  know  as 
soon  as  it  leaves  the  shell.  It  is  doubtful,  indeed,  whether 
Master  C.'s  hand  could  as  yet  aim  with  the  precision  of  the 
beak  of  the  newly  hatched  chick.  If  he  had  only  chanced  on 
a  later  decade  he  might  have  known  that  five  months  is  the 
time  given  by  a  recent  authority  (Raehlmann)  as  the  period 
commonly  taken  in  learning  the  grasping  movements,  and  so 
had  his  pride  in  his  boy's  achievement  wholesomely  tempered,1 

1  Preyer's  boy  perfected  the  action  in  the  fifth  month.  For  dif- 
ferences in  precocity  here,  see  F.  Tracy,  The  Psychology  of  Child- 
hood, pp.  12,  13. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  415 

These  early  movements  are  acquired  under  the  stimulus  of 
certain  impulses  which  constitute  the  instinctive  basis  of 
volition.  Thus  it  is  obvious  that  the  movement  of  carrying 
to  the  mouth  as  also  that  of  reaching  and  grasping  was  inspired 
by  the  nutritive  or  feeding  instinct,  that  deep-seated  impulse 
which  is  common  to  man  and  the  whole  animal  kingdom,  and 
is  the  secret  spring  of  so  much  of  his  proud  achievement.  The 
impulse  to  seize  and  appropriate  may  perhaps  be  regarded 
as  an  instinct  which  has  become  detached  from  its  parental 
stock,  the  nutritive  impulse.  Our  observer  remarks,  with  a  touch 
of  cynicism,  that  the  predominance  of  the  grasping  propensities 
of  the  race  was  illustrated  by  the  fact  that  his  boy  only  manifested 
the  impulse  to  relinquish  his  hold  on  an  object  some  time  after 
he  had  displayed  in  its  perfection  the  impulse  to  seize  or  grasp 
an  object.  Thus  it  was  some  months  later  that  he  was  first 
observed  deliberately  to  cast  aside,  as  if  tired  of  it,  a  thing 
with  which  he  had  been  playing. 

One  of  the  deepest  and  most  far-reaching  instincts  is  to  get 
rid  of  pain  and  to  prolong  pleasure.  In  C.'s  case  the  working  of 
the  first  was  illustrated  in  a  large  number  of  movements,  such  as 
twisting  the  body  round,  scratching  the  head,  and  so  forth.  An 
illustration  of  the  impulse  to  renew  an  agreeable  effect  occurred 
in  the  early  part  of  the  eighth  month.  The  child  was  sitting 
on  his  mother's  lap  close  to  the  table  playing  with  a  spoon. 
He  accidentally  dropped  if  and  was  impressed  with  the  effect 
of  sound.  He  immediately  repeated  the  action,  now,  no  doubt, 
with  the  purpose  of  gaining  the  agreeable  shock  for  his  ear. 
After  this  when  the  spoon  was  put  into  his  hand  he  deliberately 
dropped  it.  .  Not  only  so,  like  a  true  artist,  he  went  on  improv- 
ing on  the  first  effect,  raising  the  spoon  higher  and  higher  so 
as  to  get  more  sound,  and  at  length  using  force  in  dashing  or 
banging  it  down. 

Children,  as  everybody  knows,  are  wont  to  render  their 
elders  that  highest  form  of  flattery,  imitation.  Our  chronicle 
is  unfortunately  rather  meagre  in  observations  on  the  first 
imitative  movements.  There  is  no  evidence  that  the  writer 
went  to  work  in  Preyer's  careful  way  to  test  this  capa- 
bility. He  thinks  he  saw  distinct  traces  of  imitation  (of 


416  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  pointing  movement)  at  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  week, 
though  he  admits  that  a  deliberate  attempt  to  copy  a 
movement  was  only  placed  beyond  doubt  some  time  later. 

There  is,  I  regret  to  say,  a  terrible  gap  in  the  chronicle  be- 
tween the  ninth  and  the  sixteenth  month.  This  is  particularly 
unfortunate  because  this  is  just  the  period  when  the  child  is 
making  a  beginning  at  some  of  the  most  difficult  of  accomplish- 
ments, e.g.,  mastering  the  speech  of  his  ancestors.  To  make 
up  for  this  loss,  the  record  becomes  fuller  and  decidedly  more 
interesting  as  we  enter  upon  the  second  year.  To  this  next 
stage  of  the  history  we  may  now  pass. 

Second   Year. 

The  observations  from  the  date  of  the  resumption  of  the 
diary,  at  the  age  of  sixteen  months,  begin  to  have  more  of 
human  interest  about  them.  It  is  not  till  this  year  has  ad- 
vanced that  the  child  makes  headway  in  handling  the  knotty 
intricacies  of  an  elaborate  language  like  ours,  and  it  is  through 
the  medium  of  this  mastered  speech  that  he  is  best  able  to 
disclose  himself  to  the  observer.  The  observations  on  C.'s 
progress  during  the  second  year  relate  largely  to  language  and 
intelligence  as  expressing  itself  in  language.  We  may,  accord- 
ingly, begin  this  section  by  giving  a  brief  sketch  of  the  child's 
linguistic  progress. l 

During  the  first  six  months  nothing  was  observable  in  the 
way  of  vocal  sounds  but  the  ordinary  baby-singing  utterances 
of  the  '  la-la '  category.  In  this  tentative  vocalisation  vowel 
sounds,  of  course,  preponderated.  There  was  quite  a  gamut  of 
quaint  vowel  sounds,  ranging  from  the  broad  a  to  the  cockney 
ow,  that  is,  a-oo.  These  sounds  were  purely  emotional  signs. 
Thus  a  prolonged  a  sound  indicated  surprise  with  a  dash  of  dis- 
pleasure when  the  child  suddenly  encountered  an  obstacle  to  his 
movements,  as  on  catching  his  dress  or  striking  his  head  gently. 
Again,  a  kind  of  5  or  oo  sound,  formed  by  sucking  in  the  breath, 
appeared  to  indicate  that  the  small  person  was  pleased  with 
some  new  object  of  contemplation,  as  a  freshly  discovered 
picture. 

1  This  should  be  read  in  connexion  with  Study  V. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  417 

A  sudden  enlargement  of  the  range  of  articulatory  excursion 
was  noticeable  on  the  completion  of  the  twenty-seventh  week, 
when  C.  astonished  his  parents  by  breaking  out  into  a  series 
of  '  da-da's  '  and  '  ba-ba's  '  or  '  pa-pa's  '.  These  reduplications 
were  quite  in  keeping  with  his  earlier  sounds,  e.g.,  a-oo,  a-oo. 
He  soon  followed  up  this  brilliant  success  by  other  experiments, 
as  in  the  production  of  the  sounds  on-a  and  ditta,  also  ung 
and  nng.1 

Coming  now  to  the  commencement  of  the  true  linguistic 
period,  that  is  to  say,  when  C.  had  attained  the  age  of  sixteen 
months,  we  find  him  by  no  means  precocious  in  the  matter 
of  speech.  He  reproduced  very  few  of  the  many  names  the 
meaning  of  which  he  perfectly  understood.  As  to  other  verbal 
signs  he  seems  to  have  acted  on  the  principle  of  biological 
economy,  saving  himself  the  articulatory  effort.  Thus  al- 
though he  used  sounds  for  expressing  assent,  viz.,  "  ey,"  with 
falling  inflection,  he  contented  himself  in  the  case  of  negation 
with  the  old  declining  or  refusing  gesture,  viz.,  shaking  the 
head.  The  movement  of  nodding  seems  to  have  been  first 
used  as  an  affirmative  sign  at  the  age  of  seventeen  months 
when  he  was  asked  whether  his  food  was  hot.2 

C.  illustrated  the  common  childish  impulse  to  mimic  natural 
sounds.  Thus  when  sixteen  months  old  he  spontaneously 
imitated  in  a  rough  fashion  the  puffing  sound  produced  by  his 
father  when  indulging  in  the  solace  of  tobacco  ;  and  he  uttered 
a  similar  explosive  sound  when  hearing  the  wind.  Yet  this 

1  This  rather  bald  account  of  early  vocal  sounds  should  be 
contrasted  with  those  of  Preyer  and  others  referred  to  in 
Study  V. 

-  Perez  speaks  of  both  the  affirmative  and  negative  movement  of 
the  head  appearing  about  the  fifteenth  month  (First  Three  Years  of 
Childhood,  Engl.  transl.,  p.  21).  Darwin  finds  that  the  sign  of  affir- 
mation (nodding)  is  less  uniform  among  the  different  races  of  men 
than  that  of  negation.  According  to  Preyer,  while  the  gesture  of 
negation  appears  under  the  form  of  a  turning  away  or  declining 
movement  as  an  instinct  in  the  first  days  of  life,  the  accepting  ges- 
ture of  nodding  (which  afterwards  becomes  the  sign  of  affirmation)  is 
acquired  and  appears  much  later  (see  his  full  account  of  the  growth 
of  these  movements,  Die  Seele  des  Kindes,  p.  242). 

27 


41 8  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

child  does  not  seem  to  have  been  a  particularly  good  illustration 
of  the  onomatopoetic  impulse. 

While  the  imitative  impulse  thus  aids  in  the  growth  of  an 
independent  baby  vocabulary,  it  contributes,  as  we  have  seen, 
to  the  adoption  of  the  language  of  the  community.  At  first, 
however,  the  little  learner  will  not  repeat  a  sound  merely  in 
response  to  another's  lead.  Many  a  mother  is  doubtless  able  to 
recall  the  chagrin  which  she  experienced  when  on  trying  to 
trot  out  her  baby's  linguistic  powers  by  giving  the  lead,  e.g., 
"  Say  ta-ta  to  the  lady  !  "  the  little  autocrat  obdurately  refused 
to  comply  with  the  parental  injunction.  It  is  only  when  what 
the  child  himself  considers  to  be  the  appropriate  circumstances 
recur,  and,  what  is  more,  when  the  corresponding  feeling  is 
excited  in  his  breast,  that  he  utters  the  sound.  Thus  C.'s 
father  observes  that  though  the  child  will  not  say  "  ta-ta " 
when  told  to  do  so,  he  will  say  it  readily  enough  when  he  sees 
him,  hat  in  hand,  moving  towards  the  door.  In  like  manner 
the  father  remarks  :  "  He  will  say,  '  Ta  '  ('  thank  you '),  on 
receiving  something,  yet  not  do  so  in  mere  response  to  me 
when  I  say  it  ".  Herein,  it  would  seem,  the  vocal  imitation  of 
children  is  less  mechanical  and  more  intelligent  than  that  of 
animals,  as  the  parrot. 

It  was  not  until  he  was  well  on  in  his  second  year  that  C. 
condescended  to  let  his  young  speech-organ  be  played  on  by 
another's  will.  By  this  time,  it  may  be  conjectured,  associa- 
tions between  sounds  and  vocal  actions  had  become  firm  enough 
to  allow  of  such  imitation  without  a  consciousness  of  exertion 
or  strain.  Having  no  special  reason  to  refuse  he  very  sensibly 
fell  in  with  others'  suggestions.  It  is  not  at  all  improbable,  too, 
that  at  this  stage  of  development  the  little  vocalist  found  a 
pleasure  in  trying  his  instrument  and  producing  new  effects. 

Of  course  these  first  tentatives  in  verbal  imitation  were  far 
from  perfect.  At  first  there  was  hardly  more  than  a  reproduc- 
tion of  the  rhythm  and  the  rise  and  fall  of  voice,  as  in 
rendering  '  All  gone,'  the  sign  of  disappearance,  by  a,  a,  with 
rise  and  fall  of  voice.  Like  other  little  people,  C.  displayed  a 
lordly  disposition  to  save  himself  trouble  and  to  expect  infinite 
pains  from  others  in  the  way  of  comprehension.  He  was  in 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  419 

the  habit  of  reducing  difficult  words  to  fragments,  the  com- 
prehension of  which  by  the  most  loyal  of  attendants  was  a 
matter  of  considerable  difficulty.  In  thus  chopping  off  splinters 
of  words  he  showed  the  greatest  caprice.  In  many  cases  he 
selected  the  initial  sounds,  e.g.,  "  bo  "  for  ball,  "  no  "  for  nose, 
"  pe  "  for  please.  In  other  cases  he  preferred  the  ending,  e.g., 
"  ek  "  for  cake,  "  be  "  for  Elizabeth.  It  looked  as  if  certain 
sounds  and  combinations,  e.g.,  I,  s,  fl,  sh,  etc.,  lay  altogether 
beyond  his  gamut.  And  others  seemed  to  be  specially  difficult, 
and  so  were  avoided  as  much  as  possible.1 

While  C.'s  parents  could  not  help  resenting  at  times  an 
economising  of  speech-power  which  imposed  so  heavy  a 
burden  on  themselves,  they  were  often  amused  at  the  way  in 
which  the  astute  little  fellow  managed  after  softening  down  all 
the  asperities  of  a  name  to  retain  a  certain  rough  semblance 
of  the  original.  Thus,  for  instance,  sugar  became  "  ooga," 
biscuit  "  bik,"  bread  and  butter  "  bup,"  fish  "  gish  "  (with 
soft  g),  and  bacon-fat,  that  is  bread  dipped  in  the  same,  "  ak  ". 
In  some  cases  it  might  have  puzzled  his  father  to  say  whether 
the  sound  was  a  reproduction  or  an  independent  creation. 
This  remark  applies  with  particular  force  to  the  name  he  gave 
himself.  His  real  name  as  commonly  used  was,  I  may  say, 
Clifford.  Instead  of  this  he  employed  as  the  name  for  himself 
"Ingi"  or  "  Ningi  "  (with  hard  g).  He  stuck  to  his  own 
invention  in  spite  of  many  efforts  to  lead  him  to  adopt  the 
name  chosen  for  him  by  his  parents.  And  perhaps  the 
sovereignty  of  the  baby  was  never  more  clearly  illustrated  than 
in  the  fact  that  in  time  he  constrained  his  parents  and  his  sister 
to  adopt  his  self-chosen  praenomen.  Possibly  his  real  name  was 
to  his  ear  a  hopelessly  difficult  mass  of  sound,  and  "  Ningi '' 
seemed  to  him  a  fair  equivalent  within  the  limits  of  practicable 
linguistics  for  so  uncouth  a  combination.-  These  changes  are 

1  Cf.  above,  p.  148  ff. 

-  The  supposition  that  'Ningi'  was  easy  seems  reasonable.  First 
of  all  it  is  in  part  a  reduplication  like  his  later  name  '  Kikkie '.  Again, 
we  know  that  children  often  add  the  final  y  or  ie  sound,  as  in  saying 
'  dinnie  '  for  dinner,  '  beddie  '  for  bread.  Once  more,  from  the  early 
appearances  of  '  ng  '  sound  in  '  ang,'  '  ung,'  etc.,  we  may  infer  it  to 


420  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

interesting  as  illustrating  how  the  child  attends  to  the  general 
form  of  the  word-sound  rather  than  to  its  constituent  elements.1 
The  same  thing  is  seen  in  the  modified  form  of  "  Ningi,"  which 
he  adopted  at  the  beginning  of  the  third  year,  viz.,  "  Kikkie," 
where,  too,  the  special  impressiveness  of  the  initial  sound  is 
illustrated. 

It  is  now  time  to  pass  to  the  most  important  phase  of  baby- 
speech  from  a  scientific  point  of  view,  namely,  the  first  use  of 
sounds  as  general  signs,  or  as  registering  the  results  of  a 
generalising  process,  as  when  the  child  begins  to  speak  of  man 
or  boy. 

It  must  be  confessed  that  our  diary  does  not  give  us  much 
that  is  startling  in  the  way  of  original  generalisation.  So  far 
as  we  can  judge,  C.  was  a  steady-going  baby,  not  given  to 
wanton  caprices.  Yet  though  not  a  genius  he  had  his  moments 
of  invention.  One  of  the  earliest  illustrations  of  a  free  work- 
ing of  the  generalising  impulse  was  the  extension  of  the 
sound  "  6t ''  (hot).  At  first  he  employed  this  sign  in  the  con- 
ventional manner  to  indicate  that  his  milk  or  other  viand  was 
disagreeably  warm.  When,  however,  he  was  seventeen  and  a 
half  months  old  he  struck  out  an  original  extension  of  meaning^ 
He  happened  to  have  placed  before  him  cold  milk.  On  tasting 
this  he  at  once  exclaimed,  "  Ot  !  "  It  looks  as  though  the 
sound  now  meant  something  unpleasant  to  taste,  though,  as 
we  shall  see  presently,  the  boy  had  another  sound  ("kaka")  for 
expressing  this  idea.2  But  "  ot  "  was  being  extended  in  an- 
other way  by  a  process  of  association.  This  was  illustrated  a 
month  later,  when  the  boy  pointed  to  an  engraving  of  Guide's 
Aurora,  and  exclaimed,  "  Ot !  "  His  dull  parents  could  not  at 
first  comprehend  this  bold  metaphoric  use  of  language,  until  they 
bethought  them  that  the  clouds  on  which  the  aeronauts  are 
sailing  are  a  good  deal  like  a  volume  of  ascending  steam. 

be  easy.  Indeed,  one  observer  (Dr.  Champneys)  tells  us  that  an 
infant's  cry  is  exactly  represented  by  the  sound  '  nga '  as  pro- 
nounced in  Germany  (Mind,  vi.,  p.  105). 

1  See  above,  p.  157  f. 

2  It  has  been  found  that  the  sensations  of  hot  and  cold  are  readily 
confused  even  by  adults. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  42! 

The  sounds  "  ke,"  "  ka,"  and  "  kaka  "  were  employed  by  C. 
from  about  the  same  age  (seventeen  and  a  half  months)  to 
express  what  is  actually  known  or  simply  suspected  to  be  dis- 
agreeable to  taste  or  smell,  such  as  a  pipe  held  near  him,  a 
glass  of  beer,  a  vinegar  bottle,  and  so  forth.  He  had  smelt  the 
beer,  and  learnt  its  disagreeable  odour,  and  in  pronouncing  the 
untried  vinegar  "  kaka  "  he  was  really  carrying  out  a  form  of 
reasoning  of  a  simple  kind.  This  sound  came  to  represent  a 
much  higher  effort  of  abstraction  some  weeks  later,  when  it 
was  applied  to  things  so  unlike  in  themselves  as  milk  spilt  on 
the  cloth,  crumbs  on  the  floor,  soiled  hands,  etc.  The  idea  here 
seized  was  plainly  that  of  something  soiled  or  dirty.  But  this 
half-aesthetic,  half-ethical  idea  was  reached  largely  by  the 
help  of  others,  more  particularly  perhaps  his  sister,  who,  as 
elder  sisters  are  wont  to  do,  supplemented  the  parental 
discipline  by  a  vigorous  inculcation  of  the  well-recognised 
proprieties. 

Another  extension  of  the  range  of  application  of  names  used 
by  others  occurred  about  the  same  time  (end  of  twentieth  month). 
He  employed  the  sound  '  ga '  (glass)  so  as  to  include  a  plated 
drinking  cup,  which  of  course  others  always  called  '  cup '. 
This  was  curious  as  showing  at  this  stage  the  superior  interest 
of  use  (that  of  drinking  utensil)  to  that  of  form  and  colour. 

The  generalisations  just  touched  on  have  to  do  with  those 
qualities  and  relations  of  things  which  strongly  impress  the 
baby  mind,  because  they  bear  on  the  satisfaction  of  his  wants 
and  his  feelings  of  pleasure  and  pain.  In  order  to  watch  the 
calm  movements  of  the  intellect,  when  no  longer  urged  by 
appetite  and  sense,  we  must  turn  to  the  child's  first  detection 
of  similarities  in  the  objective  attributes  of  things,  as  their 
shape,  size,  colour,  and  so  forth.  Here  the  first  generalisations 
respecting  the  forms  of  bodies  are  a  matter  of  peculiar  interest 
to  the  scientific  observer.  The  young  thinker,  with  whom  we 
are  now  specially  concerned,  achieved  his  first  success  in 
geometric  abstraction,  or  the  consideration  of  pure  form,  when 
just  seventeen  months  old.  He  had  learnt  the  name  of  his 
india-rubber  ball.  Having  securely  grasped  this,  he  went  on 
calling  oranges  "bo".  This  left  the  father  in  some  doubt  whether 


422  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  child  was  attending  exclusively  to  form,  as  a  geometrician 
should,  for  he  was  wont  to  make  a  toy  of  an  orange,  as  when 
rolling  it  on  the  floor.  This  uncertainty  was,  however,  soon 
removed.  One  day  C.  was  sitting  at  table  beside  his  sire, 
while  the  latter  was  pouring  out  a  glass  of  beer.  Instantly  the 
ready  namer  of  things  pointed  to  the  bubbles  on  the  surface, 
and  exclaimed,  "  Bo !  "  This  was  repeated  on  many  subsequent 
occasions.  As  the  child  made  no  attempt  to  handle  the 
bubbles,  it  was  evident  that  he  did  not  view  them  as  possible 
playthings.  As  he  got  lost  in  contemplation,  muttering,  "  Bo  ! 
bo  !  "  his  father  tells  us  that  he  had  the  satisfaction  of  feeling 
sure  that  the  young  mind  was  already  learning  to  turn  away 
from  the  coarseness  of  matter,  and  fix  itself  on  the  refined 
attribute  of  form. 

Although  this  was  the  most  striking  instance  of  pure  or 
abstract  consideration  of  form,  attention  to  the  shape  of  things 
was  proved  by  many  of  the  simple  ideas  reached  at  this  stage. 
It  is  obvious,  indeed,  that  a  ready  recognition  of  any  member 
of  a  species  of  animals,  as  dog,  in  spite  of  considerable 
variations  in  size  and  colour,  implies  a  power  of  singling  out 
for  special  attention  what  we  call  relations  of  form.  And  this 
conclusion  is  borne  out  by  the  fact  that  by  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  month  C.  was  quite  an  adept  in  recognising 
uncoloured  drawings  of  animal  and  other  familiar  forms. 

Colour  is  of  course  in  itself  of  much  more  interest  to  a 
child  than  form,  since  it  gives  a  keen  sensuous  enjoyment. 
Our  diary  furnishes  a  curious  illustration  of  a  propensity 
to  classify  things  according  to  their  colour.  In  his  nine- 
teenth month  C.  was  observed  to  designate  by  the  sound 
"  appoo "  (apple)  a  patch  of  reddish  colour  on  the  mantel- 
piece, which  bore  in  its  form  no  discoverable  resemblance 
to  an  apple.  At  the  same  time,  the  effect  of  growing  ex- 
perience and  of  a  deeper  scrutiny  of  things  in  bringing  out 
the  superior  significance  of  form  is  seen  in  the  fact  that  this 
same  word  "  appoo "  came  subsequently  to  be  habitually 
applied  to  things  of  unlike  colours,  namely,  apples,  oranges, 
lemons,  etc.  It  may  be  added  that  the  history  of  this  word 
"  appoo  "  illustrates  a  process  analogous  to  what  Archbishop 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  423 

Trench  (if  I  remember  rightly)  has  called  the  degradation  of 
words.  When  C.  first  used  this  name  it  designated  objects 
simply  as  visible  and  tangible  ones ;  he  knew  nothing  of 
their  taste.  After  he  was  permitted  to  try  their  flavours,  the 
less  worthy  sensations  now  added  naturally  contributed  a 
prominent  ingredient  to  the  meaning  of  the  word.  Thus, 
he  began  to  use  "  appoo  "  for  all  edible  fruits,  including  such 
shapeless  masses  as  stewed  apples. 

It  is  not  to  be  expected  that  children  in  their  first  attempts 
at  scrutinising  objects  should  be  able  to  take  in  completely 
a  complex  form,  as  that  of  an  animal,  with  all  its  parts 
and  their  relations  one  to  another.  C.  gave  ample  proof 
of  the  fact  that  the  first  generalisations  respecting  form  are  apt 
to  be  rough  and  ready,  grounded  simply  on  a  perception  of  one 
or  two  salient  points.  Thus,  his  first  use  of  "  bow-wow  " 
showed  that  the  name  meant  for  him  simply  a  four-legged 
creature.  About  the  fifteenth  month  this  word  was  thrown 
about  in  the  most  reckless  way.  Later  on,  when  the  canine 
form  began  to  be  disengaged  in  his  mind  from  those  of  other 
quadrupeds,  the  pointed  nose  of  the  animal  seems  to  have  be- 
come a  prominent  feature  in  the  meaning  of  the  word.  Thus, 
in  his  eighteenth  month,  C.  took  to  applying  the  name  '  bow- 
wow '  to  objects,  such  as  fragments  of  bread  or  biscuit,  as  well 
as  drawings,  having  something  of  a  triangular  form  with  a  sharp 
angle  at  the  apex.  It  is  probable  that  if  our  little  thinker  had 
been  able  at  this  stage  to  define  his  terms,  he  would  have  said 
that  a  "  bow-wow  "  was  a  four-legged  thing  with  a  pointed 
nose. 

Here,  however,  it  is  only  fair  to  C.  to  mention  that  his 
mind  had  at  this  time  become  prepossessed  with  the  image  of 
"  bow-wow".  Not  long  before  the  date  referred  to  he  had  been 
frightened  by  a  small  dog,  which  had  crept  unobserved  into  the 
room  behind  a  lady  visitor,  lain  quiet  for  some  time  under  the 
table,  and  then,  forgetting  good  manners,  suddenly  darted  out 
and  barked.  There  were  many  facts  which  supported  the 
belief  that  the  child's  mind  was  at  this  period  haunted  by 
images  of  dogs  which  approximated  in  their  vividness  to 
hallucinations  ;  and  this  persistence  of  the  canine  image  in 


424  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

the  child's  brain  naturally  disposed  him  to  see  the  "  bow-bow  " 
form  in  the  most  unpromising  objects. 

The  use  of  the  word  "  gee-gee,"  which  towards  the  end  of 
the  second  year  competed  with  "  bow-wow  "  for  the  first  place 
in  C.'s  vocabulary,  illustrates  the  same  fact.  A  horse 
was  first  of  all  distinguished  from  other  quadrupeds  by  the 
length  of  his  neck.  Thus,  when  twenty  months  old,  C.  in  a 
slovenly  way,  no  doubt,  applied  the  name  "  gee-gee  "  to  the 
drawing  of  an  ostrich,  and  also  to  a  bronze  figure  representing 
a  stork-like  bird.  This  is  particularly  curious,  as  showing  how 
a  comparatively  unimportant  detail  of  form,  as  length  of  neck, 
overshadowed  in  his  mind  at  this  time  what  we  should  consider 
the  much  more  important  feature,  the  possession  of  four  legs. 
The  following  are  selected  from  among  many  other  illustrations 
of  the  imperfect  observation  of  complex  forms.  When  twenty- 
one  and  a  half  months  old  he  took  to  calling  all  triangular 
objects,  including  drawings,  "ship".  The  feature  of  the  ship 
— as  seen  in  real  life  and  in  his  picture-books — which  had 
fixed  itself  in  his  mind  was  the  triangular  sail.1  A  similar 
propensity  to  select  one  characteristic  feature  was  illustrated  in 
another  quaint  observation  of  the  diary.  When  twenty-three 
months  old  C.'s  mother  showed  him  a  number  of  drawings 
of  patterns  of  dresses,  some  surmounted  by  faces,  some  not. 
He  pointed  to  one  of  the  latter  and  said  :  "  No  nose  !  "  .From 
this,  writes  the  father,  lapsing  again  into  his  frivolous  vein,  it 
would  seem  that  at  this  early  age  he  had  acquired  a  dim  pre- 
sentiment of  the  supreme  dignity  of  the  nasal  organ  among  the 
features  of  the  human  countenance. 

Progress  in  the  accurate  use  of  words  was  curiously 
illustrated  in  C.'s  way  of  looking  at  and  talking  about  his 
fellow-creatures.  Oddly  enough  he  began  apparently  by  con- 
fusing his  two  parents,  extending  the  name  "  ma  "  to  his 
father  till  such  time  as  he  learnt  "  papa ".  Then  he  pro- 
ceeded after  the  manner  of  other  children  to  embrace  with- 
in the  term  "  papa "  all  male  adults,  whether  known  to 
him  or  not.  Thus  he  applied  the  name  to  photographs  of 

1  I  think  this  supposition  more  probable  than  that  the  child  saw 
the  whole  form — hull,  masts  and  sails — as  a  triangle. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  425 

distinguished  savants,  artists,  and  poets,  which  he  found  in 
his  father's  album.  When  just  eighteen  months  old  he  was 
observed  to  introduce  the  word  '  man  '.  For  instance,  he  took 
to  calling  an  etching  of  a  recent  British  philosopher,  and  a 
terra-cotta  cast  of  an  ancient  Roman  one,  "man,"  as  well  as 
<l  papa  ".  Oddly  enough,  however,  members  of  the  other  sex 
were  still  called  exclusively  by  the  name  "  mamma,"  though 
the  words  "  woman  "  and  "lady"  were  certainly  used  at  least  as 
frequently  as  "  man  "  in  his  hearing.  This  earlier  discrimina- 
tion of  individual  men  than  of  individual  women  leads  the 
father  into  some  jocose  observations  about  the  more  strongly 
marked  individuality  of  men  than  of  women,  observations  which 
would  do  very  well  in  the  mouth  of  a  misogynist  of  the  old 
school,  but  are  altogether  out  of  date  in  this  advanced  age. 

By  the  twentieth  month  the  extension  of  the  name  "  papa  " 
to  other  men  was  discontinued.  His  father  tried  him  at  this 
date  with  a  photographic  album.  "  Man  "  was  now  instantly 
applied  to  all  male  adults,  except  old  ones  with  a  grey  beard. 
To  these  he  invariably  applied  the  name  of  an  old  gentleman, 
a  friend  of  his.  A  woman  was  still  called  "  mamma,"  though 
the  term  "  lady  "  ("'ady  ")  was  clearly  beginning  to  displace  it ; 
and  no  distinction  was  drawn  between  women  of  different 
ages.  Finally,  children  were  distinguished  as  boys  or  girls, 
apparently  according  as  they  were  or  were  not  dressed  in 
petticoats. 

The  reservation  of  the  names  "  papa  "  and  "  mamma"  for 
his  parents  naturally  gave  pleasure  to  these  worthy  persons. 
It  was  something,  they  said,  to  feel  sure  at  length  that  they 
were  individualised  in  the  consciousness  of  their  much-cared- 
for  offspring.  This  restricted  use  of  the  terms  may  be  supposed 
to  have  involved  a  dim  apprehension  of  a  special  relation  of 
things  to  the  child.  "  Papa  "  now  carried  with  it  the  idea  of  the 
man  who  stands  in  a  particular  connexion  with  C.  or  "  Ningi  "; 
or,  to  express  it  otherwise,  "  man  "  began  to  signify  those 
papas  who  have  nothing  specially  to  do  with  this  important 
personage.  This  antecedent  conjecture  is  borne  out  by  the 
fact  that  the  act  of  distinguishing  between  his  father  and  other 
men  followed  rapidly,  certainly  within  two  or  three  weeks,  the 


426  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

first  use  of  his  own  name  "  Ningi".  In  other  words,  as  soon 
as  his  attention  began  to  direct  itself  to  himself,  as  the  centre 
of  his  little  world-circle,  he  naturally  went  on  to  distinguish 
between  those  persons  and  things  that  had  some  special 
connexion  with  this  centre  and  those  that  had  not. 

The  consciousness  of  self  was  noticed  to  grow  much  more 
distinct  in  the  second  half  of  this  year.  As  might  be  expected 
the  first  idea  of  '  self  was  largely  a  mental  picture  of  the 
body.  Thus  the  father  tells  us  that  when  eighteen  months 
old  the  child  would  instantly  point  to  himself  when  he  heard 
his  name.  If  his  father  touched  his  face  asking  who  that  was, 
he  replied,  '  Ningi '.  Here  the  corporeal  reference  is  manifest. 
When  just  over  nineteen  months,  however,  he  showed  that  the 
idea  was  becoming  fuller  and  richer  with  the  germ  of  what  we 
mean  by  the  word  personality.  Thus  when  asked  to  give  up 
something  he  liked,  as  the  remnant  of  a  biscuit,  he  would  say 
emphatically,  '  No,  no  !  Ningi  !  '  Similarly,  when  he  saw  his 
sister  wipe  her  hands,  he  would  say  '  Ningi !  '  and  proceed  to 
imitate  the  action.  By  the  end  of  the  twenty-first  month  the 
child  began  to  substitute  '  me  '  for  '  Ningi '. 

As  we  saw  above,  the  child  and  the  poet  have  this  in  common, 
that  they  view  things  directly  as  they  are,  free  from  the  super- 
ficial and  arbitrary  associations,  the  conventional  trappings,  by 
the  additions  of  which  we  prosaic  people  are  wont  to  separate 
them  into  compartments  with  absolutely  impenetrable  walls. 
Hence  the  freshness,  the  charming  originality  of  their  utter- 
ances. 

For  example,  C.,  when  eighteen  months  old,  was  watching 
his  sister  as  she  dipped  her  crust  into  her  tea.  He  was 
evidently  surprised  by  the  rare  sight,  and  after  looking  a 
moment  or  two,  exclaimed,  "  Ba ! "  (bath),  laughing  with 
delight,  and  trying,  as  was  his  wont  when  deeply  interested  in 
a  spectacle,  to  push  his  mother's  face  round  sc  that  she  too 
might  admire  it.  The  boy  delighted  in  such  a  figurative  use  of 
words,  now  employing  them  as  genuine  similes,  as  when  he 
said  of  a  dog  panting  after  a  run,  "  Dat  bow-wow  like  puff-puff,'' 
and  of  the  first  real  ship  which  he  saw  sailing  with  a  rocking 
movement,  "Dat  ship  go  marjory-daw"  (i.e.,  like  marjory-daw 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  427 

in  the  nursery  rhyme).  Like  many  a  poet  he  had  his  recurring 
or  standing  metaphors.  Thus,  as  we  have  seen,  "  ship  "  was 
the  figurative  expression  for  all  objects  having  a  pyramidal 
form.  A  pretty  example  of  his  love  of  metaphor  was  his  habit 
of  calling  the  needle  in  a  small  compass  of  his  father's  "bir" 
(bird).  It  needs  a  baby  mind  to  detect  here  the  faint  resem- 
blance to  the  slight  fragile  form  and  the  fluttering  movement 
of  a  bird  poised  on  its  wings. 

C.  illustrates  the  anthropocentric  impulse  to  look  at  natural 
objects  as  though  they  specially  aimed  at  furthering  or  hindering 
our  well-being.  Thus  he  would  show  all  the  signs  of  kingly 
displeasure  when  his  serenity  of  mind  was  disturbed  by  noises. 
When  he  was  taken  to  the  sea-side  (about  twenty-four  months 
old)  he  greatly  disappointed  his  parent,  expectant  of  childish 
wonder  in  his  eyes,  by  merely  muttering,  "  Water  make 
noise  "-1  Again,  he  happened  one  day  in  the  last  week  of 
this  year  to  be  in  the  garden  with  his  father  while  it  was 
thundering.  On  hearing  the  sound  he  said  with  an  evident 
tone  of  annoyance,  "  Tonna  ma.  Ningi  noi,"  i.e.,  thunder 
makes  noise  for  C.,  and  he  instantly  added  "  Notty  tonna  !  " 
(naughty  thunder).  Here,  remarks  the  father,  he  was  evidently 
falling  into  that  habit  of  mind  against  which  philosophers  have 
often  warned  us,  making  man  the  measure  of  the  universe. 

The  last  quarter  of  this  year  was  marked  in  C.'s  case  by  a 
great  enlargement  of  linguistic  power.  A  marked  advance  was 
noticeable  in  the  mastering  of  the  mechanical  difficulties  of 
articulation.  Thus  he  would  surprise  his  father  by  suddenly 
bringing  out  new  and  difficult  combinations  of  sound,  as 
'flower,'  'water'  and  'fetch'.  Up  to  about  the  twenty-first 
month  C.'s  vocabulary  had  consisted  almost  entirely  of  what 
we  should  call  substantives,  such  as,  '  papa,'  '  man,'  which  were 
used  to  express  the  arrival  on  the  scene  and  the  recognition  of 
familiar  objects.  A  few  adjectives,  as  "  6t  "  (hot),  "co"  (cold), 
"  ni-ni  "  (nice),  and  "goo"  (good),  were  frequently  used,  and 
were  apparently  beginning  to  have  a  proper  attributive  function 
assigned  them.  But  these  referred  rather  to  the  effect  of 

1  He  had  been  at  the  sea-side  a  year  before  this,  but  there  was 
no  evidence  of  his  having  remembered  it. 


428  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

things  on  the  child's  feeling  than  to  their  inherent  qualities. 
His  father  failed  before  this  date  to  convey  to  him  the  meaning 
of  "  black  "  as  applied  to  a  dog.  It  is  noteworthy  that  the 
child  made  considerable  advance  in  the  use  of  "me"  and 
"  my  "  before  he  was  capable  of  qualifying  objects  by  append- 
ing adjectives  to  them.  The  first  use  of  an  adjective  for  in- 
dicating some  objective  quality  in  a  thing  occurred  at  the  end 
of  the  twenty-first  month,  when  he  exclaimed  on  seeing  a 
rook  fly  over  his  head,  "  Big  bir  !  " 

At  about  the  same  date  other  classes  of  words  came  to  be 
recognised  and  used  as  such,  giving  to  the  child's  language 
something  of  texture.  Thus  relations  of  place  began  to  be  set 
forth,  as  in  using  simple  words  like  'up,'  'down,'  'on'.  In 
some  cases  the  designation  of  these  relations  was  effected  by 
original  artifices  which  often  puzzled  the  father.  For  instance 
the  sound  '  da  '  (or  '  dow ')  was  used  from  about  the  seventeenth 
month  for  the  departure  of  a  person,  the  falling  of  a  toy  on  the 
ground,  the  completion  of  a  meal.  It  seemed  to  be  a  general 
sign  for  '  over'  or  '  gone  '.*  It  is  doubtful  whether  this  implied 
a  clear  consciousness  of  a  relation  of  place.  Sometimes  the 
attempt  to  express  such  a  relation  in  the  absence  of  the  needed 
words  would  lead  to  a  picturesque  kind  of  circumlocution.  Thus 
when  about  twenty-one  months  old  C.  saw  his  father  walking 
in  the  garden  when  he  and  his  sister  were  seated  at  the 
luncheon  table.  He  shouted  out,  'Papa  'at  off!'  thus  ex- 
pressing the  desirability  of  his  father's  entering  and  taking  part 
in  the  family  meal. 

Similar  make-shifts  would  be  resorted  to  in  designating  other 
and  more  subtle  relations.  Sometimes,  indeed,  the  child  would 
expect  his  hearers  to  supply  the  sign  of  relation,  as  when  after 
having  smelt  the  pepper  box  he  put  it  away  with  an  emphatic 
'  Papa  !  '  which  seemed  to  the  somewhat  biassed  observer  an 
admirably  concise  way  of  expressing  the  judgment  that  the 
pepper  might  suit  his  father,  but  it  certainly  did  not  suit  him. 
A  month  later  (at.  twenty-two  months)  he  condescended  to  be 
more  explicit.  Having  been  told  by  his  father  that  the  cheese 

1  Compare  above,  p.  162. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  429 

was  bad  for  Ningi,  he  indulged  a  growing  taste  for  antithesis 
by  adding,  '  Good,  papa  !  ' 

His  ideas  of  time-relations  were  at  this  date  of  the  haziest. 
He  seems  to  have  got  a  dim  inkling  of  the  meaning  of  '  by-and- 
by  '.  His  father  had  managed  to  stop  his  crying  for  a  thing 
by  promising  it  '  by-and-by '.  After  this  when  crying  he  would 
suddenly  pull  up,  and  with  a  heroic  effort  to  catch  his  breath 
would  exclaim,  '  By-'n'-by  !  '  "  What  (asks  the  father)  was  the 
equivalent  of  this  new  symbol  in  the  child's  consciousness  ? 
Was  he  already  beginning  to  seize  the  big  boundless  future 
set  over  against  the  fleeting  point  of  the  present  moment  and 
holding  in  its  ample  bosom  consolatory  promises  for  myriads 
of  these  unhappy  presents  ?  "  and  so  forth  ;  but  here  he  seems 
to  grow  even  less  severely  scientific  than  usual.  It  may  be  added 
that  about  the  same  time  (twenty-one  months)  the  child  began 
to  use  the  word  '  now  '.  Thus  after  drinki-ng  his  milk  he  would 
point  to  a  little  remainder  at  the  bottom  of  his  cup  and  say, 
'  Milk  dare  now,'  that  is  presumably  'there  is  still  milk  there'. 

His  ideas  of  number  at  this  time  were  equally  rudimentary. 
Oddly  enough  it  was  just  as  he  was  attaining  to  plurality  of 
years  that  he  began  to  distinguish  with  the  old  Greeks  the  one 
from  the  many.  One  was  correctly  called  'one'.  Any  number 
larger  than  one,  on  the  other  hand,  was  sometimes  styled  'two,'1 
sometimes  '  three.'  and  sometimes  '  two,  three,  four '.  He  had 
been  taught  to  say  '  one,  two,  three,  four,'  by  his  mother,  but  the 
first  lesson  in  counting  had  clearly  failed  to  convey  more  than 
the  difference  between  unity  and  multitude.  The  series  of  verbal 
sounds,  'two,  three,  four,'  probably  helped  him  to  realise  the  idea 
of  number,  and  in  any  case  it  was  a  forcible  way  of  expressing  it. 

As  suggested  above,  primitive  substantive-forms  probably  do 
duty  as  verbs  in  the  language  of  the  child  as  in  that  of  primitive 
man.  True  verbs  as  differentiated  signs  of  action  came  into  use 
at  the  date  we  are  speaking  of,  and  these  began  to  give  to  the 
boy's  embryonic  speech  something  of  the  structure,  the  sentence. 

As  one  might  naturally  conjecture  from  the  disproportionate 
amount  of  attention  manifestly  bestowed  on  this  child,  he  had 

1  I  find  that  another  little  boy  when  two  years  old  used  'two'  in 
this  way  for  more  than  one. 


430  STUDIES   OF  CHILDHOOD. 

all  the  masterfulness  of  his  kind,  and  the  first  form  of  the  verb 
to  be  used  was  the  imperative.  Thus  by  the  end  of  the 
twentieth  month  he  had  quite  a  little  vocabulary  for  giving 
effect  to  his  sovereign  volitions,  such  as,  '  On  !  '  (get  on), 
'  Ook ! '  (look).  It  was  in  the  use  of  commands  that  he 
showed  some  of  his  finest  inventiveness.  Thus  when  just 
seventeen  months  old  he  wanted  his  mother  to  get  up.  He  began 
by  lifting  his  hands  and  saying,  '  Ta,  ta  !  '  (sign  of  going  out). 
Finding  this  to  be  ineffective,  he  tried,  with  a  comical  simula- 
tion of  muscular  strength,  to  pull  or  push  her  up,  at  the  same 
time  exclaiming,  "  Up  !  "  The  lifting  of  the  hands  looked  like 
a  bit  of  picturesque  gesture-language.  In  his  twenty-first 
month  he  acquired  a  new  and  telling  word  of  command,  viz., 
'  Way '  (i.e.,  out  of  my  way),  as  well  as  the  invaluable  sign  of 
prohibition,  '  Do  '  (i.e.,  don't),  both  of  which,  it  need  hardly  be 
said,  he  began  to  bandy  about  pretty  freely,  especially  in  his 
dealings  with  his  sister. 

A  landmark  in  C.'s  intellectual  development  is  set  by  the 
father  at  the  age  of  nineteen  and  a  half  months.  Before  this 
date,  he  had  only  made  rather  a  lame  attempt  at  sentence- 
building  by  setting  his  primitive  names  in  juxtaposition,  e.g., 
'  Tit,  mamma,  poo,'  which  being  interpreted  means,  '  Sister 
and  mamma,  have  pudding '.  But  now  he  took  a  very 
decided  step  in  advance,  and  by  a  proper  use  of  a  verb  as  such 
constructed  what  a  logician  calls  a  proposition  with  its  subject 
and  predicate.  He  happened  to  observe  his  sister  venting 
some  trouble  in  the  usual  girlish  fashion,  and  exclaimed,  '  Tit 
ki '  (sister  is  crying),  following  up  the  assertion  by  going 
towards  her  and  trying  to  stop  her.  Another  example  of  a 
sentence  rather  more  complex  in  structure  which  occurred  a 
fortnight  later  had  also  to  do  with  his  sister.  He  saw  her 
lying  on  her  back  on  the  grass,  and  exclaimed  with  all  the 
signs  of  joyous  wonder,  'Tit  dow  ga  !  '  (i.e.,  sister  is  down  on 
the  grass).  Evidently  the  unpredictable  behaviour  of  this  mem- 
ber of  his  family  deeply  impressed  the  young  observer.  It  is 
noticeable  that  these  first  exceptional  efforts  in  assertion  were 
prompted  by  feeling.1 

1  Compare  above,  p.  171  f. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  431 

These  first  tentatives  in  verbal  assertion,  we  are  told, 
sounded  very  odd  owing  to  the  slowness  of  the  delivery  and 
the  stress  impartially  laid  on  each  word.  C.  had  as  yet  no 
inkling  of  the  subtleties  of  rhetoric,  and  was  too  much  taken 
up  with  the  weighty  business  of  expressing  thought  somehow 
to  trouble  about  such  niceties  as  relative  emphasis,  and  varia- 
tion of  pitch  and  pace. 

As  a  rule,  remarks  the  father,  it  was  surprising  how 
suddenly,  as  it  seemed,  the  boy  hit  on  the  right  succession  of 
verbal  sounds.  Only  very  rarely  would  he  stumble,  as  when 
after  having  seen  a  fly  taken  out  of  his  milk,  and  on  being 
subsequently  asked  whether  he  would  not  be  glad  to  see  his 
sister  on  her  return  from  a  visit,  he  said,  '  (Y)es,  tell  Ningi 
'bout  fy  '  (Yes,  Ningi  will  tell  her  about  the  fly).1 

The  impulse  to  express  himself,  to  communicate  his 
experiences  and  observations  to  others,  seemed  to  be  all-pos- 
sessing just  now,  and  odd  enough  it  was  to  note  the  make- 
shifts to  which  he  was  now  and  again  driven.  One  day,  when 
just  twenty  and  a  half  months  old,  he  sat  in  a  chair  with  a 
heavyish  book  which  he  found  it  hard  to  hold  up.  He  turned 
to  his  mother  and  said  solemnly,  "Boo  go  dow"  (the  book 
is  going  down  or  falling).  Then,  as  if  remarking  a  look  of 
unintelligence  in  his  audience,  he  threw  it  down  and  exclaimed, 
"  Dat !  "  by  which  vigorous  proceeding  he  gave  a  vivid  illustra- 
tion of  his  meaning. 

It  was  noticeable  that  he  would  at  this  time  play  at 
sentence-making  in  a  varied  imitation  of  others'  assertions, 
thereby  hitting  out  some  quaint  fancy  which  appeared  to 
amuse  him.  Thus  when  told  that  there  is  a  man  on  the  horse 
he  would  say,  '  Ningi  on  horse,'  '  Tit  on  horse,'  and  so  forth. 
Such  playful  practice  in  utterance  probably  furthers  the  growth 
of  readiness  and  precision  in  the  use  of  sentences. 

The  point  in  the  intellectual  growth  of  a  child  at  which  he 
acquires  such  a  mastery  of  language  as  to  carry  on  a  sustained 
conversation  is  a  proud  and  happy  one  for  the  fond  parent.  In 
the  case  of  C.  this  date,  twenty-three  months  and  ten  days,  is, 
of  course,  marked  with  red  letters.  He  made  a  great  noise 

1  See  above,  p.  173. 


432  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

running  about  and  shouting  in  his  bedroom.  His  mother 
came  in  and  rebuked  him  in  the  usual  form  ('  Naughty  1 
naughty!').  He  thereupon  replied,  "Tit  mak  noi  "  (Sister 
makes  the  noise).  Mother  (seriously) :  "  Sister  is  at  school". 
C.,  with  a  still  bolder  look  :  "  Mamma  make  noi  ".  Mother 
(with  convulsive  effort  to  suppress  laughing,  still  more  emphati- 
cally) :  "No,  mamma  was  in  the  other  room ".  C.  (looking  archly 
at  his  doll,  known  as  May)  :  "  May  make  noi  ".  This  sally  was 
followed  by  a  good  peal  of  boyish  laughter. 

The  father  evidently  feels  that  this  incident  is  highly 
suggestive  of  a  lack  of  moral  sense.  So  he  thinks  it  well 
to  add  to  the  observation  that  the  child  had  all  the  normal 
moral  sensibility.  But  of  this  more  presently. 

We  may  now  pass  to  the  comparatively  few  observations 
(other  than  those  already  dealt  with  under  verbal  utterance) 
which  refer  to  the  child's  feelings.  As  already  remarked,  he 
was,  like  most  other  children,  peevish  and  cross  in  the  first 
year,  and  I  regret  to  say  that  the  diary  refers  more  than  once 
to  violent  outbursts  of  infantile  rage  in  the  second  year  also. 
Here  is  one  sample  entry  (cet.  nineteen  months)  :  Feelings  of 
greediness,  covetousness  and  spite  begin  to  manifest  them- 
selves with  alarming  distinctness.  When  asked  to  give  up  a  bit 
of  pudding  he  says,  "  No,"  in  a  coy,  shy  sort  of  manner,  turning 
away.  When  further  pressed  he  grows  angry.  On  the  other 
hand,  he  clamours  for  his  sister's  dolls,  and  bears  refusal  with 
very  ill  grace.  When,  given  up  as  hopelessly  naughty,  he 
is  handed  over  to  the  nurse,  and  carried  out  of  the  room  by 
this  long-suffering  person,  he  ferociously  slaps  her  on  the 
face.  This  slap  appears  not  to  be  a  pure  invention,  his  sister 
having  been  driven  more  than  once  to  visit  him  with  this 
chastisement.  He  will  also  go  up  and  slap  his  sister  when 
she  cries.  He  probably  puts  the  nurse  who  carries  him  out 
and  the  sister  who  cries  in  the  same  category  of  naughty 
people.  Sometimes  he  seems  quite  overpowered  by  vexation 
of  spirit,  and  will  lie  down  on  the  floor  on  his  face  and  have  a 
good,  long,  satisfying  cry. 

The  child's  timidity  has  already  been  touched  on.  At  the 
age  of  sixteen  months,  we  are  told,  the  sight  of  the  drawing  of 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  433 

a  lion  accompanied  by  roaring  noises  imitated  by  the  father 
would  greatly  terrify  him,  driving  him  to  his  mother,  in  whose 
bosom  he  would  hide  his  face,  drawing  down  his  under  lip  in 
an  ominous  way.  Two  months  later  the  diary  tells  us  that  the 
child  has  had  a  fright.  One  day  a  lady  called  with  a  dog, 
which  secreted  itself  under  the  table,  and  later  on  suddenly 
rushed  out  and  made  for  Master  C.  The  shock  was  such  that 
since  that  time  whenever  he  hears  a  strange  noise  he  runs  to 
his  mother,  exclaiming,  '  Bow-wow !  '  in  a  terrified  manner. 

Before  the  close  of  the  year,  however,  he  began  to  show  a 
manlier  temper.  The  sight  of  a  dog  still  made  him  run 
towards  his  mother  and  cling  to  her,  but  as  soon  as  the 
animal  moved  off  he  would  look  up  into  her  face  laughingly 
and  repeat  the  consolatory  saying  which  she  herself  had  taught 
him  :  "  Ni  (nice)  bow-wow  !  bow-wow  like  Ningi  ".  In  this 
humble  fashion  did  he  make  beginning  at  the  big  task  of 
manning  himself  to  face  the  terrors  of  things. 

As  pointed  out  above,  he  extended  his  dislike  to  sudden 
and  loud  noises  to  inanimate  objects.  Thus  in  the  last  week  of 
the  year  he  was  evidently  put  out,  if  not  actually  frightened, 
by  hearing  distant  thunder  ;  and  about  the  same  date,  as  we 
have  seen,  he  showed  a  similar  dislike  to  the  sea  when  first 
taken  near  it.  He  would  not  approach  it  for  some  days,  and 
he  cried  when  he  saw  his  father  swimming  in  it. 

It  is  sad  in  going  through  the  pages  of  the  diary  to  note 
that  there  is  scarcely  any  observation  during  this  second  year 
on  the  development  of  kindly  feelings.  One  would  have 
supposed  that  with  all  the  affection  and  care  lavished  on  him 
C.  might  have  manifested  a  little  tenderness  in  response. 
The  only  incident  put  down  under  the  head  of  social  feeling  in 
this  year  is  the  following  (cet.  twenty  months)  :  "  When  he 
eats  porridge  in  the  morning  at  the  family  breakfast  he  takes  a 
look  round  and  says  :  '  Mamma,  Tit,  papa,  Ningi,' appearing  to 
be  pleased  at  finding  himself  sharing  in  a  common  enjoyment. 
This  (continues  the  narrator)  is  a  step  onward  from  the  anti- 
social attitude  which  he  took  up  not  long  since  when  some  of 
his  mother's  egg  was  given  to  his  sister  and  he  shouted 
prohibitively  :  '  No  !  no  !  '  ; 

28 


434  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

The  worthy  parent  appears  to  be  making  the  most  of  very 
small  mercies  here.  Yet  in  justice  to  this  child  it  must  be 
said  that  he  seems  to  have  shown  even  at  this  tender  age 
the  rudiment  of  a  conscience.  The  father  is  satisfied,  indeed, 
that  he  displayed  an  instinctive  respect  for  command  or 
law.  "Thus,"  he  says,  "when  sixteen  months  old  the  child 
hung  down  his  head  or  hid  it  in  his  mother's  breast  when  for 
the  first  time  I  scolded  him."  He  goes  on  to  say  that  after 
having  been  forbidden  to  do  a  thing,  as  to  touch  the  coal 
scuttle  or  to  take  up  his  food  with  his  fingers,  he  will  stop  just 
as  he  is  going  to  do  it,  and  take  on  a  curious  look  of  timidity 
or  shamefacedness. 

He  seemed,  too,  before  the  end  of  the  second  year,  to  be 
getting  to  understand  something  of  the  meaning  of  that 
recurrent  nursery-word  '  naughty,'  and  the  less  frequent '  good  '. 
When  seventeen  months  old  his  father  tried  him,  on  what 
looked  like  the  approach  of  an  outburst  of  temper,  with  a 
'  Cliffy,  be  good  !  '  uttered  in  a  firm  peremptory  manner.  The 
child's  noise  was  at  once  arrested,  and  on  the  father's  asking  : 
'Is  Cliffy  good?'  he  answered,  'Ea,'  his  sign  for  '  yes '.  A 
little  later  he  showed  that  he  strongly  disliked  being  called 
naughty,- — vigorously  remonstrating  when  so  described  with  an 
emphatic,  '  No,  no !  good  ! '  He  seems  to  have  followed  the 
usual  childish  order  in  beginning  to  apply  "  naughty  "  to 
others,  his  sister  more  particularly,  much  sooner  than  "  good  ". 
It  was  not  till  the  middle  of  the  twenty-first  month  that  he 
recognised  moral  desert  in  this  long-suffering  sister.  After  a 
little  upset  of  temper  on  her  part,  when  the  crying  was  over, 
he  remarked  in  a  quiet  approving  tone,  '  Goo  ! '  and  on  being 
asked  by  his  mother  who  was  good  he  answered,  '  Tit '. 

As  our  example  of  his  dawning  powers  of  conversation  may 
suggest,  C.  early  developed  the  childish  sense  of  fun.  Most  if 
not  all  children  love  pretence  or  make-believe.  Here  is  an 
example  of  this  childish  tendency.  When  about  eighteen 
months  old  during  a  short  visit  to  his  father's  room  C. 
happened  to  be  walking  in  the  direction  of  the  door.  His 
father  at  once  said,  '  Ta  ta,'  just  as  if  the  child  were  really 
going  away.  C.  instantly  entered  into  the  joke,  repeating  the 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  435 

*  ta  ta,'  moving  towards  the  door,  then  returning,  and  so 
renewing  the  pretty  little  fraud. 

Sometimes,  as  parents  know,  this  impish  love  of  make- 
believe  comes  very  inconveniently  into  conflict  with  discipline 
and  authority.  One  day,  about  the  same  date,  he  got  hold  of  a 
photograph  portrait  of  an  uncle  of  his.  His  mother  bade  him 
give  it  up  to  her.  He  walked  towards  her  looking  serious 
enough,  nearly  put  it  into  her  hand,  and  then  suddenly  drew 
his  hands  back  laughing. 

In  other  examples  of  laughter  given  in  this  chapter  we  see 
something  very  like  contempt.  When  two  years  and  eight 
months  old  he  was  observed  to  laugh  out  loudly  on  surveying 
his  small  india-rubber  horse,  the  head  of  which  had  somehow  got 
twisted  back  and  caught  between  the  hind  legs  and  the  tail. 
He  then  waxed  tender  and  said  pityingly,  "  Poor  gee-gee  !  " 
"  Here,"  writes  the  father  in  his  most  ponderous  manner,  "we 
see  an  excellent  example  of  the  capricious  and  variable  attitude 
of  the  childish  mind  towards  its  toys,  an  attitude  closely 
paralleled  by  that  of  the  savage  towards  his  fetich." 

The  two  or  three  notes  on  the  development  of  the  active 
powers  "have  to  do  with  the  application  of  intelligence  to  manual 
and  other  performances.  Here  is  one.  At  the  age  of  seventeen 
months  he  was  sitting  at  table  with  the  family  when  he  found 
himself  in  want  of  some  bread  and  butter.  He  tried  his 
customary  petition,  '  Bup,'  but  to  no  purpose.  He  then 
stretched  out  his  hand  towards  the  bread  knife,  repeating  the 
request.  A  day  or  two  after  this  the  father  put  his  inven- 
tive powers  to  a  severer  proof.  He  placed  the  knife  out  of 
his  reach.  When  the  desire  for  more  recurred  he  grew  very 
impatient,  looking  towards  his  father  and  saying  '  Bup  '  with 
much  vehemence  of  manner.  At  length,  getting  more  excited, 
he  bethought  him  of  a  new  expedient  and  pointed  authorita- 
tively to  his  empty  plate. 

Some  of  these  practical  tentatives  were  rather  amusing. 
One  day,  just  a  month  after  the  date  of  the  last  incident,  he 
had  two  keys,  one  in  each  hand.  With  one  of  these  he  pro- 
ceeded to  try  the  keyhole  of  the  door,  oddly  enough,  however, 
holding  it  by  the  wrong  end  and  inserting  the  handle.  Now 


436  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

came  the  difficulty  of  turning  it.  Two  hands  at  the  very  least 
were  needed,  but  unhappily  the  other  hand  was  engaged  with 
the  second  key,  which  was  not  to  be  relinquished  for  an  instant. 
So  the  little  fellow,  with  the  inventive  resource  of  a  monkey 
(the  father  naturally  says  of  an  '  engineer'),  proceeded  to  use 
his  teeth  as  pincers,  clutching  the  obstinate  key  between  these 
and  trying  to  turn  it  with  the  head.  At  this  date  he  had  acquired 
considerable  skill  in  the  manipulation  of  door  handles  and  keys. 
A  certain  cupboard  was  a  peculiarly  fascinating  mystery, 
appealing  at  once  to  the  desires  of  the  flesh  and  to  a  disin- 
terested curiosity,  and  he  was  soon  master  of  the  '  open 
sesame '  to  its  spacious  and  obscure  recesses. 

By  far  the  most  respectable  exhibition  of  will  about  this 
time  was  in  the  way  of  self-restraint.  I  have  already  re- 
marked how  he  would  try  to  pull  himself  together  when  pros- 
trated by  fear  of  the  dog.  A  similarly  quaint  attempt  at  self- 
mastery  would  occur  during  his  outbreaks  of  temper.  The 
father  says  he  had  got  into  the  way,  when  the  child  was  inclined 
to  be  impatient  and  teasing,  of  putting  up  his  finger,  lowering 
his  brow,  and  saying  with  emphasis  :  '  Cliffy,  be  good  !  '  After 
this  when  inclined  to  be  naughty  he  would  suddenly  and  quite 
spontaneously  pull  himself  up,  hold  up  his  finger  and  lower 
his  brow  as  if  reprimanding  himself.  "  The  observation  is 
curious,"  writes  the  father,  in  his  graver  manner,  "as  suggesting 
that  self-restraint  may  begin  by  an  imitation  of  the  action  of 
extraneous  authority."  l 

Third   Year. 

One  cannot  help  regretting  on  entering  upon  the  third 
chapter  of  C.'s  biography  that  the  father  gives  us  no  account  of 
his  physical  development.  This  is  a  desideratum  not  only 
from  a  scientific  but  from  a  literary  point  of  view.  Biographers 
rightly  describe  the  look  of  their  hero,  and,  if  possible,  they  aid 
the  imagination  of  their  reader  by  a  portrait.  The  reader  of 
this  child's  history  has  nothing,  not  even  a  bare  reference  to 
height,  by  which  he  can  form  an  image  of  the  concrete  person- 

1  Compare  the  similar  instances  given  above,  p.  287. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  437 

ality  whose  sayings  and  doings  are  here  recorded ;  and  these 
sayings  and  doings  begin  now  to  grow  really  interesting. 

There  is  very  little  in  the  notes  of  this  year  respecting 
the  growth  of  observation.  When  the  child  was  two  years 
five  months  old  the  father  appears  to  have  made  a  rather  lame 
attempt  to  determine  the  order  in  which  he  learnt  the 
colours.  He  says  that  he  placed  the  several  colours  before  him 
and  taught  him  the  names,  and  found  as  a  result  that  the 
order  of  acquisition  was  the  following  :  red,  blue,  yellow,  and 
green.  It  is  added  that  blue  was  distinguished  some  time 
before  green.  His  observations,  taken  along  with  those  of 
Preyer  and  others,  are  interesting  as  seeming  to  suggest  that 
the  order  in  which  the  colours  are  learnt  differs  considerably  in 
the  case  of  individual  children.1  In  the  eighth  month  of  this 
year  we  find  a  note  to  the  effect  that  the  boy  discriminates 
and  recognises  colour  well.  This  is  illustrated  by  the  fact 
that  he  at  once  calls  grey  with  a  slightly  greenish  tinge 
'  green  '.  The  connexion  between  the  possession  of  suitable 
vocables  and  explicit  discrimination  is  seen  in  the  fact  that 
whereas  he  applies  the  name  blue  not  only  to  the  several 
varieties  of  that  colour  but  also  to  violet,  he  uses  "  red  "  as 
the  name  for  certain  reds  only,  excepting  pink,  which  is  called 
*'  pink,"  and  deep  purple  red,  which  is  called  "  brown  ". 

The  third  year  is  epoch-making  in  the  history  of  memory. 
It  is  now  that  impressions  begin  to  work  themselves  into  the 
young  consciousness  so  deeply  and  firmly  that  they  become  a 
part  of  the  permanent  stock-in-trade  of  the  mind.  The  earliest 
recollections  of  most  of  us  do  not  reach  back  beyond  this  date, 
if  indeed  so  far.  In  C.'s  case  the  father  was  able  to  observe 
this  fixing  and  consolidating  of  impressions.  For  instance, 
when  two  years  and  two  months  old  he  had  been  staying  for  a 

month  or  so  at  a  farmhouse  in  a  little  sea-side  village,  D , 

where  there  was  a  sheep  dog  yclept  Bob.  Some  three  and  a  half 
months  later  he  happened,  during  one  of  his  walks  in  his 
London  suburb,  to  see  a  sheep  dog,  whereupon  he  remarked, 
'  Dat  old  Bob,  I  dink '.  A  week  or  two  after  this,  on  seeing 
the  picture  of  a  wind-mill,  he  remarked,  "  Dat  like  down  at 

1  See  above,  p.  19  f. 


438  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

D ".     Later  on,  six  months  after  this  visit,  on  being  asked 

what  honey  was,  he  remarked  that  he  had  had  some  at  D -. 

Nine  months  after  this  visit  his  father  was  talking  to  him 
about  the  game  of  cricket.  He  then  said,  "  Oh,  yes  (his 
favourite  expression  just  now  when  he  understands),  I 

'member,  Jingo  ran  after  ball  down  at  D ".     As  a  matter  of 

fact  his  father  and  friends  used  to  play  tennis  at  D ,  and 

Jingo,  the  sheep  dog,  did  pretend  to  '  field '  the  balls,  often  in 
a  highly  inconvenient  fashion. 

It  is  evident  from  these  quotations  that  the  experiences  at 

D ,  just  at  the  beginning  of  the  third  year,  had  woven 

themselves  into  the  tissue  of  his  permanent  memory.  The 
father  remarks  in  a  footnote  that  C.  retains  a  certain  recollec- 
tion of  D —  —  at  present,  that  is  to  say,  in  his  fourteenth  year. 

These  lively  recallings  show  a  growth  of  imaginative  power, 
and  this  was  seen  in  other  ways  too.  Thus  it  is  remarked 
by  the  father  in  the  fourth  month  of  the  year  that  he  was  getting 
much  comfort  from  anticipation.  If  there  are  apples  or  other 
things  on  the  table  which  he  likes  but  must  not  have,  he  will 
philosophically  remark,  "Ningi  have  apples  by-and-by  when  he 
big  boy  ".  He  says  this  with  much  emphasis,  rising  at  the  end 
to  a  shouting  tone,  and  half  breaking  out  into  jubilant  laughter. 

The  childish  power  of  vivid  imaginative  realisation  was 
abundantly  illustrated  in  his  play.  Here  is  a  sample  (end  of 
fourth  month).  His  sister  went  to  the  end  of  the  room  and 
said  (with  a  reference  to  their  recent  visit  to  the  sea-side)  :  '  I'm 
going  far  away  on  the  beach '.  He  then  began  to  whisper  some- 
thing, and  went  under  the  table  and  said  distinctly  :  '  Ningi 
go  away  from  Tit,  far  away  on  beach '.  He  repeated  this  with 
tremulous  voice,  and  at  length  burst  out  crying.  He  wept 
also  when  his  sister  pretended  to  do  the  same,  so  that  these 
little  tragic  representations  had  to  be  stopped  as  dangerously 
exciting. 

It  has  often  been  said  that  'fibbing'  in  young  children  is  the 
outcome  of  a  vivid  imagination.  C.  illustrated  this.  As  the 
example  given  under  the  second  year  shows,  his  daring  in  in- 
venting untruth  and  passing  it  off  as  truth  was  pure  play,  and 
frankly  shown  to  be  so  by  the  accompaniment  of  a  hearty 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  439 

laugh.  This  tendency  to  invent  continued  to  assert  itself. 
Thus  when  (in  the  eighth  month)  he  is  asked  a  question,  as, 
"  Who  told  you  so  ?  "  and  has  no  suitable  answer  ready 
he  will  say,  '  Dolly,'  showing  his  sense  of  the  fun  of  the  thing 
by  a  merry  laugh.  The  father  remarks  that  it  is  a  little  diffi- 
cult to  bring  heavy  moral  artillery  to  bear  on  this  playful 
fibbing  which  is  evidently  intended  much  more  to  astonish  than 
to  deceive.1 

We  may  now  see  what  progress  C.  was  making  in  thinking 
power  during  this  year.  It  is  during  the  third  year  that  children 
may  be  expected  to  get  a  much  better  hold  on  the  slippery 
forms  of  language,  and  at  the  same  time  to  show  in  connexion 
with  a  freer  and  more  extensive  use  of  language  a  finer  and 
deeper  insight  into  the  manifold  relations  of  things. 

In  C.'s  case,  to  judge  by  the  journal,  the  progress  of 
speech  advanced  at  a  normal  pace,  neither  hurrying  nor  yet 
greatly  loitering.  Articulation,  the  father  remarks  early  in  the 
year,  has  got  much  more  precise,  only  a  few  sounds  seeming  to 
occasion  difficulty,  as  for  example  the  initial  5,  which  he  trans- 
forms into  an  aspirate,  saying,  for  example,  '  huga  '  for  sugar. 

A  noticeable  linguistic  advance  is  registered  in  the  fourth 
month  of  the  year,  viz.,  a  kind  of  sudden  and  energetic  raid  on 
the  names  of  objects  and  persons.  "  He  is  always  asking  the 
names  of  things  now  (writes  our  chronicler).  Thus,  after 
calling  a  common  object,  as  a  brush,  by  its  name  he  will  ask 
me,  '  What  is  the  name  of  this  ? '  Perhaps  he  thinks  that 
everything  has  its  own  exclusive  or  '  proper'  name  as  he  has. 
He  is  beginning  to  note,  too,  that  some  things  have  more 
than  one  proper  name,  that  his  mother,  for  example,  though 
called  '  ma  '  by  himself,  is  addressed  by  her  Christian  name 
by  me,  and  so  forth.  When  asked,  '  What  is  Ningi's  name  ? ' 
he  now  answers,  '  Kifford  '." 

What  is  far  more  significant,  he  now  (tzt.  two  years  three 
months)  began  to  use  'you  '  in  addressing  his  father  or  mother, 
also  '  me '  and  '  I  '.  But  these  changes  are  so  momentous 
and  epoch-making  in  the  history  of  the  young  intelligence 
that  they  will  have  to  be  specially  considered  later  on. 

1  Compare  above,  p.  254. 


44O  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

Like  other  children  he  showed  a  fine  contempt  for  the 
grammatical  distinctions  of  pronominal  forms.  Thus  '  me'  was 
used  for  'mine,'  'her'  for  'she,'  'she's'  for  'hers,'  '  him  ' 
for  '  he '  and  for  '  his,'  '  us  '  for  '  our,'  and  so  forth.1  It 
is  pretty  clear  that  none  of  these  solecisms  was  due  to  an 
imitation  of  others'  incorrect  speech,  and  they  appear  to  show 
the  action  of  the  principle  of  biological  economy,  a  few  word- 
sounds  being  made  to  do  duty  for  a  number  of  relations  (e.g., 
in  the  use  of  '  me  '  for  '  my  '),  and  familiar  word-sounds  being 
modified  according  to  analogy  of  other  modifications  where  older 
people  use  a  quite  new  form  ('  she's  '  for  '  hers  ').  A  similar  dis- 
position to  simplify  and  rationalise  the  tongue  of  his  ancestors 
showed  itself  in  the  use  of  verbs.  Thus,  if  his  mother  said, 
'  Cliffy,  you  are  not  good,'  he  would  reply  in  a  perfectly  rational 
manner,  "  Yes,  I  are  ".  "  It  was  odd,"  writes  the  father,  "  to 
hear  him  bring  out  in  solemn  judge-like  tones  such  terrible 
solecisms  as  '  Him  haven't,'  yet  there  was  a  certain  logical 
method  in  his  lawlessness."  Another  simplification  on  which 
he  hit  in  common  with  other  children  was  the  use  of  '  did '  as 
a  sign  of  past  tense,  thus  saving  himself  all  the  trouble  of 
understanding  the  irregular  behaviour  of  our  verbs.2 

One  or  two  quaint  applications  of  words  are  noted.  Thus 
towards  the  end  of  the  third  month  of  this  year  he  took  to 
using  '  cover '  in  a  somewhat  puzzling  fashion.  Thus  he  once 
pointed  to  the  back  of  his  hand  and  remarked,  '  No  milk  on 
this  cover '.  The  father  suspects  that  the  term  connoted  for 
his  consciousness  an  outside  part  or  the  outer  surface  of  an 
object. 

A  very  noticeable  improvement  took  place  in  the  forming 

1  Later  on  towards  the  end  of  the  year  he  oddly  enough  seemed 
disposed  to  reverse  his  early  practice,  using  for  example  '  she  '  for 
'  her,'  and  even  going  to  the  length  of  correcting  his  sister  for  saying 
'  Somebody   gave   her,'    by  remarking   with    all   the    dogmatism    of 
the  most  pedantic  of  grammarians,  "  No,  E.,  you  must  say  '  Gave 
she  '  ". 

2  Compare  above,  p.  176  f.     C.'s  father  probably  makes  too  much 
of  the  principle  of  economy  here.     Thus,  like  other  children,  the  boy 
was  wont  to  use  double  negatives,  e.g.,  "  Dare  isn't  no  water  in  dat 
cup,"  where  there  is  clearly  a  redundance 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  441 

of  sentences.  All  sorts  of  questions  (writes  the  chronicler)  are 
now  put  correctly  and  neatly,  as,  '  Where  are  you  going  to  ?  ' 
'  Where  did  that  come  from  ? '  He  is  now  striking  out  most 
ambitiously  in  new  and  difficult  directions,  not  fighting  shy 
even  of  such  school-horrors  as  conditional  clauses  (as  they  used 
to  be  called,  at  least).  Very  funny  it  must  have  been  to  watch 
these  efforts,  and  the  ingenuities  of  construction  to  which  the 
little  learner  found  himself  driven.  For  example,  he  happened 
one  morning  (end  of  fourth  month)  when  in  his  father's  bed- 
room to  hear  a  knocking  in  the  adjoining  room.  He  walked 
about  the  room  remarking  to  himself,  '  I  can't  make  out  some- 
body,' which  seemed  his  own  original  fashion  of  avoiding  the 
awkwardness  of  our  elaborate  form,  "  I  can't  make  out  who  the 
person  is  (that  is  knocking)  ".  A  still  quainter  illustration  of 
the  skill  with  which  he  found  his  way  out  of  linguistic  diffi- 
culties is  the  following.  His  sister  once  said  to  him  (first  week 
of  fifth  month),  '  You  had  better  not  do  that,'  whereupon  he 
replied,  "  I  think  me  better  will  ".  Here  is  a  sample  of  his 
mode  of  dealing  with  conditionals  (end  of  sixteenth  month), 
"  If  him  (a  tree)  would  be  small,  I  would  climb  up  ". 

His  highly  individualised  language,  remarks  the  father,  was 
rendered  more  picturesque  by  the  recurrence  of  certain  odd 
expressions  which  he  picked  up  and  applied  in  his  own  royal 
fashion.  One  of  these  was,  "  Well,  it  might  be  different," 
which  he  often  used  when  corrected  for  a  fault,  and  on  other 
occasions  as  a  sort  of  formula  of  protestation  against  what  he 
thought  to  be  an  exaggerated  statement. 

We  may  now  notice  some  new  manifestations  of  thinking 
power.  All  thought,  we  are  told,  proceeds  by  the  finding  out 
of  similarities  and  dissimilarities.  C.  continued  to  note  the  re- 
semblances of  things.  Thus  one  day  (end  of  second  month) 
he  noticed  the  dog  Jingo  breathing  quickly  after  a  smart  run 
and  observed,  '  Like  puff-puff'.  But  what  was  much  more 
noticeable  this  year  was  the  boy's  impulse  to  draw  distinctions 
and  contrasts.  It  may  certainly  be  said  in  his  case  that 
likeness  was  distinctly  apprehended  before  difference,  that 
in  the  development  of  his  rhetoric  the  antithesis  followed  the 
simile.  One  of  the  first  contrasts  to  impress  the  tender  con- 


442  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

sciousness  of  children  is  that  of  size.  This  comes  out  among 
other  ways  in  their  habit  of  setting  their  own  puny  persons  in 
antithesis  to  big  grown-up  folk,  a  habit  sufficiently  attested 
by  the  recurring  expressions,  "  When  I  am  big,''  "  When  I 
am  a  man ".  C.,  like  other  children,  took  to  denoting  a 
contrast  of  size  by  a  figurative  extension  of  the  relation, 
mamma — baby.  Thus  it  was  noted  (end  of  seventh  month) 
that  he  would  call  a  big  tree  "  mamma  tree,"  and  a  shrub 
"  baby  tree  ".  One  day  he  pointed  to  the  clock  on  the  mantel- 
piece and  talked  of  the  '  big  mamma  clock  '.  He  had,  it  seems, 
just  before  been  playing  with  his  father's  watch,  which  he  also 
called  clock.1 

This  love  of  contrasting  appeared  in  a  striking  manner  in 
connexion  with  the  use  of  propositions.  If,  for  example  (third 
month),  his  father  says,  "  That's  a  little  watch,"  he  at  once 
brings  out  the  point  of  the  statement  by  adding,  '  That  not  a 
big  watch  '.  The  same  perception  of  contrast  would  some- 
times help  him  to  take  the  edge  off  a  disagreeable  prohibition 
when  unguardedly  worded.  Thus  when  told  one  day  not  to 
make  much  noise,  he  considered  and  rejoined,  "  Make  little 
noise  ". 

A  more  subtle  perception  of  contrast  betrayed  itself  towards 
the  end  of  the  ninth  month.  His  father  had  been  speaking  to 
him  of  the  little  calf  which  made  a  big  noise.  He  mentally 
turned  over  this  astonishing  bit  of  contrariness  in  the  order  of 
things,  and  then  observed  with  a  sage  gravity,  "  Big  calf  not 
make  little  noise,"  which  so  far  as  the  limited  faculties  of  the 
observer  could  say  appeared  to  mean  that  the  contrast  between 
size  and  sound  did  not  hold  all  round,  that  the  big  sound 
emerging  from  the  little  thing  was  an  exception  to  the  order  of 
nature. 

In  connexion  with  this  habit  of  opposing  qualities  and 
statements  reference  may  be  made  to  the  curious  manner  in 
which  the  boy  expressed  negation.  It  was  evidently  a  diffi- 
culty for  him  to  get  hold  of  the  negative  particle,  and  to  deny 
straight  away,  so  to  speak.  At  first  (beginning  of  the  year) 
he  seemed  to  indicate  negation  or  rejection  merely  by  tone  of 

1  Compare  above,  p.  163  f. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  443 

voice.  Thus  he  would  say  about  something  which  he  evidently 
did  not  like,  '  Ningi  like  that,'  with  a  peculiar  querulous 
tone  which  was  apparently  equivalent  to  the  appendage  '  N.B. 
ironical  '.  About  a  fortnight  later  he  expressed  negation  by 
first  making  the  correlative  affirmation  and  adding  '  No,'  thus: 
"  Ningi  like  go  in  water — no  !  "  A  week  later,  it  is  noted, 
'  no  '  was  prefixed  to  the  statement,  as  when  he  shouted,  '  No, 
no,  naughty  Jingo,'  in  contradiction  of  somebody  who  had 
called  the  dog  naughty.  Towards  the  end  of  the  third  month 
'  not '  came  to  be  used  as  an  alternative  for  '  no,'  which  little 
by  little  it  displaced. 

The  father  remarks  that  C.'s  sister  had  had  a  similar  trick 
of  opposing  statements,  e.g.,  "  Dat  E.'s  cup,  not  mamma's 
cup  ".  He  then  proceeds  to  observe  in  his  somewhat  heavy 
didactic  manner  that  these  facts  are  of  curious  psychological 
and  logical  interest,  showing  us  that  negation  follows  affirma- 
tion, and  can  at  first  only  be  carried  out  by  a  direct  mental 
confronting  of  an  affirmation,  and  so  forth.1 

As  already  shown  by  the  reference  to  the  use  of  '  somebody  ' 
C.'s  thought  was  growing  slightly  more  abstract.  Yet  how 
slow  this  advance  was  is  illustrated  in  his  way  of  dealing  with 
time-relations,  some  of  the  most  difficult,  as  it  would  seem, 
for  the  young  mind  to  grapple  with.  At  the  end  of  the  second 
month  the  ideas  of  time,  we  are  told,  were  growing  more  exact, 
so  far  at  least  that  he  was  able  to  distinguish  a  present  time 
from  both  a  past  and  a  future.  He  called  the  present  variously 
'  now,'  '  a  day  '  (to-day)  or  '  dis  morning  '.2  The  present 
seemed,  so  far  as  the  father  could  judge,  to  be  conceived  of  as 
a  good  slice  of  time.  '  To-morrow '  and  '  by-and-by '  now  served 
to  express  the  idea  of  futurity,  the  former  referring  to  a  nearer 
and  more  definitely  conceived  tract  of  time  than  the  latter. 

1  On  the  use  of  antithesis  in  children's  language  and  on  the  early 
forms  of  negation,  see  above,  p.  174  f. 

2  A  note  in  the  diary  says  that   C.'s  sister  had  also  used  'this 
morning '  in  a  similar  way  for  any  present.      Can  this  curious  habit 
arise,  he  asks,  from  the  circumstance  that  children  hear  '  this  morn- 
ing '  more  frequently  than   '  this  afternoon  '  and  '  this  evening,'  or 
that  they  are  more  wakeful  and   observant  in  the  early  part  of  the 
day? 


444  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

That  the  child  had  no  clear  apprehension  of  our  time-divisions 
is  seen  not  only  in  his  loose  employment  of  'dis  morning,'  but 
in  his  habitual  confusion  of  the  names  of  meals,  as  in  calling 
dinner  '  tea,'  tea  '  dinner '  or  '  breakfast,'  and  so  forth. 

Another  abstruse  idea  for  the  child's  mind  is  that  of  absence. 
It  would  seem  as  if  this  were  thought  of  at  first  as  a  disappear- 
ance. As  all  mothers  know,  when  a  child  is  asked  where  some- 
body is  he  answers,  'All  gone'.  C.,  on  his  return  from  D 

(end  of  second  month),  when  asked  where  the  people  and  the 
highly  interesting  Jingo  were,  would  say,  '  All  gone,'  and  some- 
times add  picturesquely,  '  in  the  puff-puff'.1 

The  acquisition  of  clearer  ideas  about  self  and  others  has 
been  touched  on  in  connexion  with  the  growth  of  the  boy's 
language.  The  first  use  of  '  I  '  and  the  contemporaneous  first 
use  of  '  you  '  (end  of  third  month)  seem  to  point  to  a  new 
awakening  of  the  intelligence  to  the  mystery  of  self,  and  of  its 
unique  position  in  relation  to  other  things.  There  is  to  the 
father  evidently  something  pathetic  in  the  gradual  abandon- 
ment of  the  self-chosen  name,  '  Ningi,'  of  the  early  days,  and 
the  adoption  of  the  common-place  '  I  '  of  other  people.  But 
we  need  not  attend  to  his  sentimental  musings  on  this  point. 
The  exchange,  we  are  told,  was  effected  gradually,  as  if  to 
make  it  easier  to  his  hearers.  At  first  (beginning  of  year)  we 
have  '  me '  brought  on  the  scene,  which,  be  it  observed,  did 
duty  both  for  '  me '  and  for  '  my  '.2  Later  on  followed  'I,'  as  an 
occasional  substitute  for  '  me,'  as  if  he  were  beginning  to  see  a 
difference  between  the  two,  though  unable  to  say  wherein 
precisely  it  lay.  Within  less  than  a  month,  we  are  told,  the 

1  (Note  of  the  father.)     C.,  on  leaving  D- -,  had  travelled  by 

the  train.  He  may,  therefore,  have  intended  merely  to  say  "removed 
from    sight  through  the  agency  of  the  locomotive  ".      From  other 
examples,  however,  it  would  look  as  if  the  boy  meant  to  explain  all 
disappearance  as  a  removal  from  his  own  local  sphere. 

2  The  chronicler  observes  here  that  C.'s  sister  had  also  used  the 
same  expression  for  '  I '  and  '  mine,'  viz.,  "  my".     It  looks  as  if  the 
me  and  its  belongings  were  not  at  first  differentiated.     Even  of  the 
later  and  maturer  ideas  of  self  a  well-known  American  psychologist 
writes :  "  Between  what  a  man  calls  me  and  what  he  simply  calls 
mine  the  line  is  difficult  to  draw  ".     Compare  above,  p.  181. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  445 

child  was  beginning  to  use  "  Kikkie  "  as  his  name  in  place 
of  "  Ningi,"  which  "  Kikkie  "  was  afterwards  improved  into 
"  Kifford ".  "  It  was  evident  (writes  the  narrator)  that  in 
venturing  on  the  slippery  ground  of  '  I '  and  'you 'he  experienced 
a  sudden  accession  of  manly  spirit,  as  a  result  of  which  he  began 
to  despise  the  '  Ningi '  of  yore."  But  dear  old  '  Ningi'  did  not 
go  out  all  at  once,  and  we  read  so  late  as  the  end  of  the 
third  month  of  his  amusing  his  mother  when  standing  on 
the  window-sill  of  the  nursery  by  remarking  thoughtfully, 
"  How  am  I,  Ningi,  come  down  ?  "  Here,  it  would  seem 
evident,  the  addition  of  '  Ningi '  was  intended  to  help  the 
faculties  of  his  mother  in  case  this  still  puzzling"!"  should 
prove  too  much  for  them.  By  the  end  of  the  fourth  month  we 
read  that  '  I  '  was  growing  less  shy,  not  merely  coming  on  the 
scene  in  familiar  and  safe  verbal  companionship,  as  in  expres- 
sions like  '  I  can,'  but  boldly  pushing  its  way  alone  or  in  new 
combinations.1  By  the  sixth  month  (at.  two  and  a  half)  the 
name  Ningi  may  be  said  to  have  disappeared  from  his 
vocabulary.  His  rejection  of  it  was  formally  announced  at  the 
age  of  two  years  seven  and  a  half  months.  On  being  asked  at 
this  date  whether  he  was  Ningi  he  answered,  "  No,  my  name 
Kiffie  ".  He  then  added,  "  Ningi  name  of  another  little  boy," 
very  much  as  in  a  remarkable  case  of  double  personality 
described  by  M.  Pierre  Janet,  the  transformed  personality  look- 
ing back  on  the  original  observed,  "  That  good  woman  is  not 
myself".  He  looked  roguish  in  saying  this,  as  if  there  were 
something  funny  in  the  idea  of  altered  personality.  The 
determination  to  be  conventional  was  shown  at  the  same  date 
in  the  fact  that  when,  for  example,  the  mother  or  father,  fol- 
lowing the  old  habit, .would  bid  him  go  and  ask  the  nurse  to 
wash  "  Cliffie's  hands,"  he  would,  in  delivering  the  message, 
substitute  "  my  hands  ".  By  the  end  of  the  year  '  I '  came  to  be 
habitually  used  for  self,  as  in  answering  a  question,  e.g.,  "Who 
did  this  or  that  ? "  Tyrannous  custom  had  now  completely 
prevailed  over  infantile  preferences. 

During  the  third  year  C.  seemed  determined  to  prove  to 

1  The  same   holds  true  of  'me,'  which    was  first   used   only  in 
particular  connexions,  as  '  Give  me  '. 


446  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

his  parents  and  sister  that  he  had  attained  the  age  of  reason. 
He  began  to  ply  these  well-disposed  persons  with  all  manner 
of  questionings.  Sometimes,  indeed,  as  when  in  the  case  al- 
ready referred  to  he  would  ask  for  the  names  of  things  just 
after  calling  them  by  their  names,  the  long-suffering  mother 
was  half  inclined  to  regret  the  acquisition  of  speech,  so  much 
did  it  present  itself  at  this  stage  in  the  light  of  an  instrument  of 
torture.  But  the  child's  questionings  were  rarely  attributable 
to  a  spirit  of  persecution  or  to  sheer  "  cussedness  ".  He  began 
in  the  usual  manner  of  children  to  ask  :  '  Who  made  this  and 
that?'  (early  in  the  fourth  month).  That  there  is  a  simple  pro- 
cess of  reasoning  behind  this  question  is  seen  in  his  sometimes 
suggesting  an  answer  thus:  "Who  made  papa  poorly? 
Blackberries  ;  "  where  there  was  obviously  a  reference  to  an 
unpleasant  personal  experience.  His  mind  about  this  time 
seemed  greatly  exercised  in  the  matter  of  sickness  and  health. 
One  day  (middle  of  sixth  month)  walking  out  with  his  mother 
he  met  a  man,  whereupon  ensued  this  dialogue  :  C.  '  Is  that 
a  poorly  gentleman  ?  '  M.  '  No.'  C.  '  Is  that  a  well  gentle- 
man ? '  M.  'Yes.'  C.  'Then  who  made  him  well  ?  '  From 
which  (writes  the  father)  it  would  look  as  if,  just  as  Plato 
could  only  conceive  of  pleasure  as  a  transition  from  pain, 
Master  C.  could  only  conceive  of  health  as  a  process  of  con- 
valescence.1 

Another  way  of  prying  into  the  origin  of  things  seems 
worth  mentioning.  Having  found  out  that  certain  pretty 
things  in  the  house  had  been  "bought,"  he  proceeded  with 
the  characteristic  recklessness  of  the  childish  mind  to  assume  that 
all  nice  things  come  to  us  this  way.  One  day  (middle  of  third 
month)  he  asked  his  father,  "  Who  bought  lady  ?  "  lady  being 
an  alabaster  figure  of  Sappho.  The  father  then  asked  him,  and 
he  answered  :  "  Mamma".  Asked  further  where,  he  replied  : 
"  In  town  ".  This  looked  like  romancing,  but  it  is  hard  to 
draw  the  line  between  childish  romancing  and  serious  thought. 
He  may  have  really  inferred  that  the  alabaster  lady  had  come 
to  the  house  that  way.  A  still  funnier  example  of  the  appli- 

1  This  reminds  one  of  the  childish  use  of  '  broken  '  and  '  mended,' 
illustrated  above,  p.  98. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  447 

cation  of  his  purchasing  idea  occurred  at  the  date,  three 
months  and  one  week.  Stroking  his  mother's  face  he  said  : 
"  Nice  dear  mother,  who  bought  you  ? "  What,  asks  the 
father,  did  he  understand  by  "  bought  "  ?  Perhaps  only  some 
mysterious  way  of  obtaining  possession  of  nice  pretty  things. 

The  other  form  of  reason-hunting  question,  '  What  for  ?  '  or 
*  Why  ?  '  came  to  be  used  about  the  same  time  as  "  Who 
made  ?  "  etc.  In  putting  these  questions  he  would  sometimes 
suggest  answers  of  a  deliciously  childish  sort  (as  the  writer  has 
it).  Thus  one  day  (beginning  of  fourth  month)  he  saw  his 
father  putting  small  numbered  labels  on  a  set  of  drawers,  and 
after  his  customary  "  What  dat  for  ?  "  added  half  inquiringly, 
"To  deep  drawers  nice  and  warm?"  C.  would  pester  his 
parents  by  asking  not  only  why  things  were  as  they  were,  but 
why  they  were  not  different  from  what  they  were.  Thus  (end 
of  third  month)  on  seeing  in  a  nursery  book  a  picture  of 
Reynard  the  fox  waving  his  hat  he  asked  in  his  slow  emphatic 
way  :  '  Why  not  dat  fox  put  on  his  hat  ?  '  In  a  similar  way 
he  would  ask  his  mother  why  she  did  not  go  to  school,  and  so 
forth.1 

With  this  questioning  there  went  a  certain  amount  of  con- 
fident assertion  respecting  the  reasons  of  things.  At  first  C. 
proceeded  modestly,  reproducing  reasons  given  by  an  adequate 

authority.     Thus  when  told  during  his  stay  at  D that  he 

would  not  go  into  the  sea  to-day,  he  would  supplement  the 
announcement  by  adding  the  reason  as  given  before  by  his 
mother,  e.g.,  "  'Cause  it's  too  cold,"  or,  "  'Cause  big  waves  to- 
day ".  Very  soon,  however,  he  took  a  step  forward  and 
discovered  reasons  for  himself.  One  day  (end  of  fifth  month) 
his  father  was  seating  him  at  table,  and  was  about  to  add  a 
second  cushion  to  the  chair  when  he  remarked  in  his  gravest 
of  manners,  "  I  can't  put  my  leg  in,  you  know  (i.e.,  under  the 
table),  if  me  be  higher  ".  Here  is  another  of  these  specimens  of 
reasoning,  dating  two  weeks  later,  and  based  like  the  first  on 
direct  observation.  His  father  was  walking  out  with  him  on 
the  famous  Heath  of  their  suburb.  The  former,  probably  more 
than  half  lost  in  one  of  his  trains  of  philosophic  speculation, 

1  Compare  above,  p.  86  ff. 


448  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

observed  absent-mindedly,  "Why  are  these  babas  (sheep)  running 
away  ?  "  C.  promptly  took  up  the  question  and  answered  with 
vigour,  "  'Cause  the  bow-wow  dare  with  man  ".  As  a  matter 
of  fact  a  man  was  approaching  with  a  small  dog,  which  the 
father  in  his  reverie  had  failed  to  see. 

Of  course,  the  reasoning  was  not  always  so  consonant  with 
our  standard  as  in  these  two  examples.  C.  appears  to  have 
had  his  own  ideas  about  the  way  in  which  things  come  about. 
For  example,  he  seems  to  have  argued,  like  certain  scholastic 
logicians,  that  the  effect  must  resemble  the  cause.  At  least, 
after  finding  out  that  his  milk  came  from  the  cow,  he  referred 
the  coldness  of  his  milk  one  morning  (towards  end  of  fourth 
month)  to  the  coldness  of  the  cow, — which  property  of  that 
serviceable  quadruped  was,  of  course,  a  pure  invention  of  his 
own.  Just  three  months  later  he  came  out  one  morning 
with  the  momentous  announcement,  "  Milk  comes  from  the 
white  cow  down  at  D "  ;  and  on  being  asked  by  his  ever- 
attentive  father  what  sort  of  milk  the  brown  cow  gave,  instantly 
replied,  '  Brown  milk '  ;  where,  again,  it  must  be  admitted,  he 
came  suspiciously  near  romancing. 

He  seems,  further,  to  have  shown  slight  respect  for  the 
logical  maxim  that  the  same  effect  may  be  brought  about  in 
more  than  one  way.  For  C.  nature  was  delightfully  simple, 
and  everything  happened  in  one  way,  and  in  one  way  only. 
So  that,  for  example,  when  during  a  walk  (end  of  sixth  month) 
his  glove  happened  to  slip  off,  he  proceeded  in  a  most  hasty 
and  unfair  manner  to  set  down  the  catastrophe  to  the  malignity 
of  the  wind,  exclaiming,  "  Naughty  wind  to  blow  off  glove". 

A  like  want  of  maturity  of  judgment  in  dealing  with  the 
subtle  connexions  of  nature's  processes  showed  itself  in  other 
ways.  Thus  he  argued  as  if  the  same  agency  would  always 
bring  about  like  results,  whatever  the  material  dealt  with.  An 
amusing  illustration  of  this  occurred  in  the  latter  half  of  the 
tenth  month.  He  was  observed  towards  the  end  of  a  meal 
pouring  water  on  sundry  bits  of  bread  on  his  plate,  and  on 
being  asked  why  he  was  doing  this,  said  :  '  To  melt  them,  of 
course  '. 

One  of  his  thoroughly  original  ideas  was  that  other  things 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A    FATHER'S   DIARY.  449 

besides  living  ones  grow  bigger  with  time.  One  day  (middle 
of  sixth  month)  he  began  to  use  a  short  stick  as  a  walking- 
stick.  His  mother  objected  that  it  was  not  big  enough,  on 
which  he  observed:  "Me  use  it  for  walking-stick  when  stick 
be  bigger  ".  In  like  manner  just  a  month  later  he  remarked, 
apropos  of  a  watch-key  which  was  too  small  for  the  father's 
watch,  that  it  would  be  able  to  wind  up  the  watch  '  when  it 
grow  bigger  '.  So  far  as  the  father  could  observe  it  was  only 
little  things  which  he  thought  would  increase  in  size.  It  thus 
looked,  adds  the  father,  like  a  kind  of  extension  of  the  supreme 
law  of  his  own  small  person  to  the  whole  realm  of  wee  and 
despised  objects.1 

C.  followed  other  children  and  the  race  which  he  so  well  re- 
presented in  supposing  that  sensation  is  not  confined  to  the 
animal  world.  Thus  towards  the  end  of  the  eleventh  month 
when  warned  in  the  garden  not  to  touch  a  bee  as  it  might  sting, 
he  at  once  observed  :  "  It  might  sting  the  flower".  "  It  is  odd," 
interpolates  the  father  here,  "that  C.'s  sister,  when,  towards  the 
end  of  her  fourth  year,  she  was  bidden  not  to  touch  a  wasp  on  the 
window-pane,  had  gone  further  than  C.  by  suggesting  that  it 
might  sting  the  glass.  Everything  seems  to  live  and  to  feel  in 
the  child's  first  fancy-created  world."  2 

Towards  the  end  of  the  year,  it  appears,  C.  developed  con- 
siderable smartness  in  logical  fencings  with  his  mother  and 
others,  warding  off  unpleasant  prohibitions  by  a  specious  dis- 
play of  argument.  For  example,  when  told  that  something  he 
wanted  would  make  him  poorly,  he  rejoined  :  '  I  am  poorly,' 
evidently  thinking  that  he  had  convicted  his  estimable  parent 
of  what  logicians  call  irrelevant  conclusion. 

One  cannot  say  that  these  first  incursions  into  the  domain 
of  logic  do  Master  C.  particular  credit.  Perhaps  we  may  see 
later  on  that  he  came  to  use  his  rational  faculty  with  more 
skill  and  precision,  and  to  turn  it  to  nobler  uses  than  the  in- 
vention of  subterfuges  whereby  he  might  get  his  wilful  way. 

The  notes  on  the  development  of  the  feelings  continue  to 
be  rather  scanty.  I  will  reproduce  one  or  two  of  the  more  note- 
worthy. 

1  Compare  above,  p.  97  f.  2  Compare  above,  p.  96  ff. 

29 


450  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

The  visit  to  D- —  -  was  attended  with  a  great  change  in 
his  feeling  for  animals.  He  no  longer  feared  them.  Jingo, 
spite  of  his  warlike  name,  was  an  amiable  creature,  and  seems 
to  have  reconciled  him  to  the  canine  species.  Cats,  too,  now 
came  in  for  special  affection.  He  would  watch  the  animals  in 

D ,  horses,  cows,  and  especially  ducks,  with  quiet  delight 

for  many  minutes,  imitating  their  sounds.  Strange  to  say, 
now  that  fear  had  gone  he  showed  himself  disposed  to  take 
liberties  with  animals.  Thus  he  would  slap  Jingo  and  even  his 
favourite  cat  in  moments  of  displeasure,  just  as  he  and  his 
sister  before  him  used  to  slap  their  dolls. 

A  new  emotion  showed  itself  towards  the  end  of  the  fourth 
month,  viz.,  shyness.  If  his  parents  unguardedly  spoke  about 
him  at  table  he  would  hang  down  his  head  and  put  his  hands 
over  his  face.  So  far  as  the  father  could  observe  this  expres- 
sion of  shyness  was  unlearned.  His  sister,  it  appears,  had 
not  been  remarkable  for  the  feeling.  The  father  observes  that 
the  fact  of  this  new  feeling  synchronising  with  the  acquisition 
of  the  use  of  '  I,'  '  my,'  etc.,  seems  to  show  that  it  was 
connected  with  the  growth  of  self-consciousness. 

His  sense  of  fun  continued  to  develop,  though  it  still  had 
a  decidedly  rude  and  primitive  character.  When  just  four 
months  on  in  the  year  his  father  amused  him  by  battering  in 
an  old  hat  of  his  own.  He  broke  into  loud  laughter  at  this 
performance.  We  know,  writes  the  observer,  how  the  sight 
of  a  hat  in  trouble  convulses  the  grown  mind.  Can  it  be  that 
C.  was  already  forming  associations  of  dignity  with  this  com- 
pletion and  crown  of  human  apparel  ? 

Tender  emotion,  as  became  a  boy,  perhaps,  was  in  abey- 
ance. He  rarely  indulged  in  manifestations  of  love,  or  if  he 
did,  it  must  have  been  towards  his  mother  secretly  in  a  con- 
fidence that  was  never  violated.  Here  is  one  of  the  few  in- 
stances recorded  (beginning  of  eighth  month).  He  happened 
to  see  his  own  picture  in  his  mother's  eye  and  said  in  a  highly 
sentimental  tone  :  "  Dear  pitty  little  picture,  I  do  love  'oo," 
and  then  proceeded  to  kiss  his  mother's  eyelid.  It  was  little 
things,  as  kittens,  flowers,  and  so  forth,  which  seemed  to  move 
him  to  this  occasional  melting  mood. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  451 

The  sympathetic  feelings  though  still  weak  may  be  said  to 
be  slowly  developing.  Thus  in  the  first  month  of  the  year  it 
is  remarked  that  he  now  thinks  of  his  sister  when  absent,  so 
that  if  he  has  the  highly-prized  enjoyment  of  a  biscuit  he  will 
suggest  that  '  Tit  have  bisc  too  '. 

This  year  witnessed  the  formation  of  more  definite  aesthetic 
likings  in  the  matter  of  colours  and  forms.  His  dislike  for  a 
black  cat  and  black  things  generally,  may  perhaps  be  called  in 
a  way  a  preference  of  taste.  In  his  animal  picture-books,  of 
which  he  was  now  growing  very  fond,  he  showed  a  marked  dislike 
for  a  monkey  with  an  open  mouth,  also  for  the  rhinoceros,  and 
strong  likings,  on  the  other  hand,  for  birds  in  general,  also  for 
horses  and  zebras. 

He  began  to  learn  nursery  rhymes,  and  showed  a  good  ear 
for  rhyme.  Thus  in  saying  : — 

Goosey  goosey  gander, 
Where  shall  I  wander  ? 

he  was  observed  (end  of  tenth  month)  to  correct  the  rhyme  by 
first  pronouncing  the  a  in  "  wander"  less  broadly  than  is  our 
wont,  just  as  in  "  gander,"  and  then  substituting  the  conven- 
tional pronunciation. 

The  moral  side  of  the  child's  nature  appears  during 
this  year  to  have  undergone  noticeable  changes.  The  most 
striking  fact  which  comes  out  in  the  picture  of  the  boy  as 
painted  in  the  present  chapter  is  the  sudden  emergence  of  self- 
will.  He  began  now  to  show  himself  a  veritable  rebel  against 
parental  authority.  Thus  we  read  (about  the  end  of  the  sixth 
week)  that  when  corrected  for  slapping  Jingo,  or  other  fault,  he 
would  remain  silent  and  half  laugh  in  a  cold  contemptuous  way, 
which  must  have  been  shocking  to  his  worthy  parents.  A 
month  later  we  hear  of  an  alarming  increase  of  self-will.  He 
would  now  strike  each  of  these  august  persons,  and  follow  up  the 
sacrilege  with  a  profane  laugh.  As  might  be  expected  from  his 
general  use  of  subterfuge  about  this  time,  he  showed  a  lament- 
able want  of  moral  sensibility  in  trying  to  shirk  responsibility. 
Thus  (middle  of  seventh  month)  he  was  noticed  by  his  mother 
putting  a  spill  of  paper  over  the  fire-guard  into  the  fire  so  as  to 


452  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

light  it.  His  mother  at  once  said  :  "  Ningi  mustn't  do  that". 
Whereupon  he  impudently  retorted  :  "  Ningi  not  doing  that, 
paper  doing  it  ".1 

All  this  is  dreadful  enough,  yet  it  is  probable  that  many 
children  go  through  a  longer  or  shorter  stage  of  rebellion,  who 
afterwards  turn  out  to  be  well-behaved,  respectable  persons. 
And,  as  his  father  is  not  slow  to  point  out,  C.,  even  in  these  re- 
bellious outbursts,  showed  the  rudiments  of  moral  feeling  in  the 
shape  of  a  deep  sensitiveness  to  injury  and  more  definitely  to- 
unjust  treatment.  Thus  we  are  told  (middle  of  seventh  month) 
that  when  his  sister  eats  the  leavings  of  his  pudding  or  other 
dainty  he  shows  a  well-marked  moral  indignation.  He  gets  very 
excited  at  such  moments,  his  eyes  dilating,  his  voice  rising  in 
pitch,  and  his  arms  executing  a  good  deal  of  violent  gesticulation. 
When  scolded  by  his  mother  for  doing  a  thing  which  he  has  only 
appeared  to  do,  he  will  turn  and  exclaim,  with  all  the  signs  of 
righteous  wrath,  "  Mamma  naughty  say  dat ! "  One  day  (end  of 
seventh  month)  when,  after  being  very  naughty,  his  mother  had 
to  carry  him  upstairs,  he  broke  out  into  a  more  than  usually 
violent  fit  of  crying.  His  mother  asked  him  what  he  meant 
by  making  such  a  noise  when  being  carried  upstairs  ;  where- 
upon he  replied,  "  'Cause  you  carry  me  up  like  a  pig"  (as  re- 
presented in  one  of  his  picture-books). 

There  is  nothing  particularly  meritorious  in  all  this,  yet  it 
is  significant  as  showing  how,  in  this  third  year,  the  conscious- 
ness of  self  was  developing  not  only  on  its  intellectual  but  on 
its  moral  side,  as  a  sense  of  personal  dignity  and  rightful  claim, 
which,  after  all,  is  a  very  essential  element  in  a  normal  and 
robust  moral  sentiment. 

Fourth    Year. 

The  reports  of  progress  during  the  fourth  year  are  still 
scantier  than  their  predecessors  :  perhaps  the  observer  was 
getting  tired  of  his  half-playful  work.  Nevertheless,  there  are 
some  interesting  observations  in  this  chapter  also. 

C.'s  observation  seems   to    have    been    decidedly  good,  to 

1  Compare  above,  p.  273  f. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  453 

judge  by  an  incident  that  occurred  at  the  end  of  the  third  week 
of  the  year.  He  had  been  to  the  Zoological  Gardens.  His 
father  asked  him  about  the  seals,  and  more  particularly  as  to 
whether  they  had  legs.  He  answered  at  once,  "  No,  papa, 
they  had  foot-wings  ".  The  chronicler  is  evidently  proud  of 
this  feat,  and  thinks  it  would  have  satisfied  Professor  Huxley 
himself.  But  allowance  must  here  as  elsewhere  be  made  for 
parental  pride. 

The  child's  colour-sense,  we  are  told  about  the  same  time, 
was  developing  quite  satisfactorily.  He  could  now  (end  of  fifth 
week)  discriminate  and  name  intermediate  shades  of  colour. 
Thus  he  called  a  colour  between  yellow  and  green  quite 
correctly  '  yellowish  green,'  and  this  way  of  naming  colours 
was,  so  far  as  the  father  could  ascertain,  quite  spontaneous. 
Later  (three  and  a  half  months),  on  being  questioned  as  to 
violet,  which  he  first  said  was  blue,  he  replied  correcting  his 
first  answer,  "and  purple".  Later  on  (beginning  of  last 
quarter),  he  could  distinguish  a  'purplish  blue'  from  a  "purplish 
pink  ". 

Along  with  a  finer  observation  we  find  a  more  active  and 
inventive  imagination.  It  was  during  this  year  that  he  began 
to  create  fictitious  persons  and  animals,  and  to  surround  him- 
self with  a  world,  unseen  by  others,  but  terribly  real  to  him- 
self. 

About  the  middle  of  the  third  month  he  made  his  first  essay 
in  story-fabrication.  Considering  that  he  had  a  lively  and 
imaginative  elder  sister,  who  was  constantly  regaling  him  with 
fairy  and  other  stories,  this  argues  no  particular  precocity. 
His  first  style  in  fiction  was  crude  enough.  He  would  pi'e  up 
epithets  in  a  way  that  makes  the  most  florid  of  journalistic 
diction  seem  tame  by  comparison.  Thus  he  would  begin  the 
description  of  a  dog  by  laying  on  a  miscellaneous  pile  of  colour- 
-adjectives,  blue,  red,  green,  black,  white,  and  so  forth.  With 
a  similar  disregard  for  verisimilitude  and  concentration  of  aim 
on  strong  effect,  he  would  pile  up  the  agony  in  a  story,  relating, 
for  example,  how  the  dog  that  had  killed  a  rabbit  ("  bunny  ") 
had  his  head  beaten  off,  was  then  drowned,  and  so  on,  through 
a  whole  Iliad  of  canine  calamity.  Here  is  another  example  of 


454  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

his  literary  sensationalism  (middle  of  ninth  month).  While  he 
and  his  father  were  taking  a  walk  in  the  country,  where  the 
family  was  staying,  they  found  the  feathers  and  bones  of  a  bird 
in  a  tiny  cleft  in  the  tree.  The  father  thereupon  began  to 
weave  for  him  a  little  story  about  the  unfortunate  bird,  how  it 
had  taken  shelter  there  one  cold  winter's  day  weary  and  hungry, 
and  had  grown  too  weak  to  get  away.  This  did  not  satisfy 
the  strong  palate  of  our  young  poet,  who  proceeded  to  improve 
on  the  tragedy.  "  P'haps  a  snake  there,  p'haps  dicky  bird  flew 
there  one  cold  winter  day  and  snake  ate  it  up,  and  then  spit  it 
out  again,"  and  so  forth.  "  P'haps  (he  ended  up)  he  (the  bird) 
thought  there  was  nothing  but  wind  (air)  there.'' 

He  had,  of  course,  his  super-sensible  world,  made  up  of 
mysterious  beings  of  fairy-like  nature,  who,  like  the  spirits  of 
primitive  folk-lore,  were  turned  to  account  in  various  ways. 
The  following  incident  (seven  months  one  week)  may  illustrate 
the  modus  operandi  of  the  child's  myth-making  impulse.  He 
was  eagerly  looking  forward  to  going  to  a  circus.  His  father 
told  him  that  if  it  rained  he  would  not  be  able  to  go,  for 
nobody  could  drive  away  the  rain.  Whereupon  he  instantly 
remarked  :  "  The  Rainer  can  ".  His  father  asked  him  who 
this  wonderful  person  was,  and  he  replied  :  "  A  man  who  lives 
in  the  forest — my  forest — and  has  to  drive  rain  away  ".  The 
expression  "  drive  away  "  used  by  the  father  had  been  enough 
to  give  this  curious  turn  to  his  fancy. 

His  fairy-world  was  concocted  from  a  medley  of  materials 
drawn  from  his  observations  of  animals,  his  experiences  at  the 
circus,  including  the  ladies  in  beautifully  tinted  short  dresses, 
whom,  with  childish  awe,  he  named  '  fairies,'  and  the  book-lore 
that  his  sister  was  imparting  to  him  from  Stories  of  Uncle 
Remus,  and  other  favourites.  In  the  ninth  month  he  got  into 
the  way  of  talking  of  his  fairy-world,  of  the  invisible  fairies, 
horses,  rabbits,  and  so  forth,  to  which  he  gave  a  local  habitation 
in  the  wall  of  his  bedroom.  When  in  a  difficulty  he  thinks  his 
fairies  can  help  him  out.  Nothing  is  too  wonderful  for  their 
powers  :  they  can  even  solace  his  pitiful  heart  by  making  a 
dead  dog  alive  again.  For  the  rest,  like  other  imaginative 
children,  he  peoples  the  places  he  knows,  especially  dark  and 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  455 

mysterious  ones,  with  imaginary  beings.  Thus  one  day,  on 
walking  in  a  wood  with  his  mother,  he  was  overheard  by  her 
talking  to  himself  dreamily  in  this  wise  :  "  Here  there  used  to 
be  wolves,  but  long,  long  time  ago". 

It  is  noticeable  that  at  this  same  period  of  his  myth-making 
activity  he  began  to  speak  of  his  dreams.  He  evidently  takes 
these  dream-pictures  for  sensible  realities,  and  when  relating 
a  dream  insists  that  he  has  actually  seen  the  circus-horses  and 
fairies  which  appear  to  him  when  asleep.  Possibly,  writes 
the  father,  this  dreaming,  as  in  the  case  of  the  primitive  race, 
had  much  to  do  in  developing  his  intense  belief  in  a  super- 
natural world.  It  may  be  added  that  during  this  same  period 
he  was  in  the  habit  of  seeing  the  forms  of  his  animals,  as  lions, 
"  gee-gees,"  in  such  irregular  and  apparently  unsuggestive 
groupings  of  line  as  those  made  by  the  cracks  in  the  ceiling 
of  his  nursery.1 

There  is  little  to  note  in  the  way  of  verbal  invention.  Here 
is  one  amusing  specimen  (third  week  of  third  month).  His 
father  asked  him  whether  his  toy-horse  was  tired,  whereupon 
he  answered  :  '  No,  I  make  him  untired  '.  This  leads  off  the 
writer  to  an  abstruse  logical  discussion  of  "  negative  terms," 
and  how  it  comes  about  that  we  do  not  all  of  us  talk  in  C.'s 
fashion  and  say  'untired,'  ' unfatigued'.  Another  quaint  inven- 
tion was  the  use  of  '  think  '  as  a  noun.  It  was  funny,  writes 
the  father,  to  hear  him  rejecting  his  sister's  statements  by  the 
contemptuous  formula  :  "  That's  only  your  thinks  ". 

His  understanding  was  slowly  ripening  in  spite  of  his 
free  indulgence  in  the  intoxicating  pleasures  of  the  imagina- 
tion. He  could  understand  much  that  was  said  to  him  by  the 
aid  of  a  liberal  application  of  metaphor.  Thus  one  day  (end 
of  the  year)  his  father  when  walking  with  him  late  in  the 
evening  in  a  park  where  sheep  were  grazing  told  him  that 
animals  did  not  want  bed-clothes,  but  could  lie  on  the 
grass  wet  with  dew  and  afterwards  be  dried  with  the  sun. 
He  said  :  "  Yes,  the  sun  is  their  towel  to  make  them  dry  ". 

The  subtleties  of  time  were  still  too  much  for  him.  In  the 
fourth  month  of  the  year  when  his  sister  was  narrating  an 

1  Compare  above,  p.  28  ff. 


456  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

incident  of  the  evening  before  and  used  the  term  '  yesterday,' 
he  corrected  her  saying:  "  No,  E.,  last  night".  Yet  he  was 
now  beginning  to  penetrate  into  the  mysteries  of  the  subject. 
His  father  happened  one  day  (end  of  seventh  month)  to  speak 
of  to-morrow.  C.  then  asked  :  "  When  is  to-morrow  ?  To- 
morrow morning  ?  "  He  then  noticed  that  his  hearers  were 
remarking  on  his  question,  and  proceeded  to  expound  his  own 
view  of  these  wonderful  things.  "  There  are  two  kinds  of 
to-morrow,  to-morrow  morning  and  this  morning  ;  "  and  then 
added  with  the  sagest  of  looks  :  "  To-morrow  morning  is  to- 
morrow now  ". 

At  this  the  father  tells  us  both  he  and  the  mother  were 
sorely  puzzled,  and  if  one  may  be  allowed  to  read  between  the 
lines,  it  is  not  improbable  that  the  latter  must  have  indulged 
in  some  such  exclamation  as  this  :  "  There  !  this  comes  of 
your  stimulating  the  child's  brains  too  much  ".  However  this 
be,  it  is  certain  that  the  observer's  mind  was  greatly  exercised 
about  this  dark  and  oracular  deliverance  of  the  child.  What 
could  he  have  meant  ?  At  length  he  bethought  him  that  the 
child  was  unable  as  yet  to  think  of  pure  abstract  time.  To- 
morrow had  to  be  filled  in  with  some  concrete  experience, 
wherefore  his  wishing  to  define  it  as  "  to-morrow  morning  " 
with  the  interesting  experiences  of  the  early  hours  of  the  day. 
And  if  "  to-morrow  "  means  for  his  mind  to-morrow's  experi- 
ence, he  is  quite  logical  in  saying  that  it  becomes  to-day's  ex- 
perience. Whether  the  father  has  here  caught  the  subtle  thread 
of  childish  thought  may  be  doubted.1  Who  among  the  wisest 
of  men  could  be  sure  of  seizing  the  precise  point  which  the 
child  makes  such  praiseworthy  effort  to  render  intelligible  to  us  ? 

It  would  appear  as  if  C.  were  still  rather  muddled  about 
numbers.  One  day  (end  of  third  month)  he  was  looking  at 
some  big  coloured  beads  on  a  necklace,  and  touching  the 
biggest  he  said  to  his  mother  :  "  These  are  six,"  then  some 
smaller  ones:  "these  five,"  then  some  still  smaller  ones: 
"  these  four,"  and  so  on.  He  was  apparently  failing  as  yet  to 
distinguish  number  from  that  other  mode  of  quantity  which 
we  call  magnitude. 

1  Compare  what  was  said  above,  p.  119. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  457 

The  use  of  the  word  "  self"  at  this  time  showed  that  it  had 
reference  mainly  'to  the  body,  and  apparently  to  the  central 
trunk.  Thus  one  evening  towards  the  end  of  the  eleventh 
month,  after  being  put  to  bed,  he  was  heard  by  his  mother 
crying  out  peevishly.  Asked  by  her  what  was  the  matter  he 
answered,  "  I  can't  get  my  hands  out  of  the  way  of  myself"  ; 
which,  being  interpreted  by  his  mother,  was  his  way  of  saying 
that  he  could  not  wriggle  about  and  get  into  cool  places  (the 
evening  was  a  warm  one)  as  he  would  like  to  do. 

As  might  be  inferred  from  his  essays  in  fictitious 
narrative,  he  was  getting  quite  an  expert  in  the  matter  of 
assertion.  It  was  odd  sometimes,  observes  the  journal,  to 
hear  the  guarded  manner  in  which  he  would  proffer  a  statement. 
Thus,  on  one  occasion  (beginning  of  twelfth  month),  he 
reported  to  his  father,  who  had  been  from  home  for  some  days, 
that  he  had  been  behaving  quite  satisfactorily  during  his 
absence,  and  then  added  cautiously,  "  I  did  not  see  mamma 
punish  me,  anyhow  ". 

During  this  year  he  followed  up  his  questioning  relentlessly, 
often  demanding  the  reasons  of  things,  as  children  are  wont 
to  do,  in  a  sorely  perplexing  fashion.  His  interrogatory 
embraced  all  manner  of  objects,  both  of  sense-perception  and 
of  thought.  Thus  he  once  asked  his  mother  (seventh  month) 
how.  it  was  that  he  could  put  his  hand  through  water  and  not 
through  the  soap.  A  matter  that  came  to  puzzle  him  especially 
just  now  was  growth.  Thus,  when  told  by  his  father  (tenth 
month)  that  a  little  tree  would  grow  big  by-and-by,  he  asked, 
"  How  is  it  that  everything  grows — flowers,  trees,  horses,  and 
people  ?  "  or,  as  he  worded  it  a  few  days  later,  "  How  can 
trees  and  sheep  grow  without  anybody  making  them  ?  "  He 
seems  now  (notes  the  father)  to  have  given  up  his  belief  in  the 
growth  of  lifeless  things.  The  inequalities  of  size  among  fully 
grown  things  were  also  a  puzzle  to  him.  Thus,  when  just 
four  years  old,  he  was  much  concerned  to  know  why  ponies 
did  not  grow  big  like  other  horses.1 

The  father  must  doubtless  at  this  time  have  had  his  hands 
full  in  satisfying  the  intellectual  cravings  of  the  child.  But, 

1  Compare  what  was  said  above,  pp.  88,  104. 


458  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

happily,  the  small  inquirer  would  sometimes  come  forward  to 
help  out  the  explanation.  One  day  (end  of  the  year)  his 
father,  when  walking  out  with  him,  pointed  to  a  big  dray-horse 
and  said:  "That  is  a  strong  horse".  On  which  the  child 
observed  :  "  Ah  !  that  horse  can  gallop  fast ".  He  was  then 
told  that  heavy  horses  did  not  go  fast.  He  looked  puzzled  for 
a  moment  and  then  asked  :  "  Do  you  mean  can't  lift  themselves 
up?"  "Had  he,"  asks  the  father,  "noticed  that  when 
weighted  with  thick  clothes  or  other  impedimenta  he  was  less- 
springy,  and  so  found  his  way,  as  is  the  manner  of  children, 
from  his  own  experience  to  explaining  the  apparent  contra- 
diction of  the  strong  and  slow  horse  ?  " 

Other  questionings  were  less  amenable  to  purposes  of 
instruction.  He  would. often  get  particularly  thoughtful  im- 
mediately after  going  to  bed,  and  put  posers  to  his  mother. 
For  example,  one  evening  (tenth  month)  he  asked  in  his  slow, 
earnest  way,  "  Where  was  I  a  hundred  years  ago  ?  "  and  then 
more  precisely,  "  Where  was  I  before  I  was  born  ? "  These 
are,  as  everybody  knows,  stock  questions  of  childhood,  and, 
perhaps,  are  hardly  worth  recording.  It  is  otherwise  with  a 
curious  poser  which  he  set  his  father  about  the  middle  of  the 
last  month  :  "  When  are  all  the  days  going  to  end,  papa  ?"  It 
is  a  pity  that  the  diary  does  not  record  the  answer  given  to 
the  question.  In  lieu  of  this  we  have  the  customary  pedantic 
style  of  speculation  about  the  "  concept"  of  infinity  with  refer- 
ences to  Sir  W.  Hamilton  and  I  don't  know  what  other 
profound  metaphysicians.  The  answer,  if  any  was  attempted, 
does  not  appear  to  have  been  very  satisfactory  to  Master  C., 
for  we  read  further  on  that  more  than  three  months  after  this 
date  he  put  the  same  question  about  all  the  days  ending  to  his 
mother. 

With  this  questioning  about  the  causes  of  things  there  went 
much  assigning  of  reasons.  By  the  end  of  the  fourth  month, 
it  is  remarked,  he  was  getting  more  accurate  in  his  thinking, 
substituting  limited  generalisations  such  as,  "  Some  people  do 
this,"  for  the  first  hasty  and  sweeping  ones.  He  appears, 
further,  to  have  grown  much  more  ready  in  finding  reasons, 
bringing  out  " 'cause "  (because)  on  all  manner  of  occasions, 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  459 

much  to  his  own  satisfaction  and  hardly  less  to  that  of  his 
observant  father.  He  continued,  it  is  added,  to  display  the 
greatest  ingenuity  in  finding  reasons  for  his  own  often  capri- 
cious-looking behaviour,  and  especially  in  discovering  excuses 
whereby  a  veil  of  propriety  might  be  thrown  over  actions  which 
he  knew  full  well  would,  if  left  naked,  have  a  naughty  look. 

The  tendency  to  give  life  to  things  observable  in  the  last 
year  was  less  marked,  but  broke  out  now  and  again,  as  when 
sitting  one  day  (beginning  of  tenth  month)  on  his  chair  on  a 
loose  cushion  and  wriggling  about  as  his  manner  was,  he  felt 
the  cushion  slipping  from  under  him  and  exclaimed  :  "  Hullo  ! 
I  do  b'lieve  this  cushion  is  alive.  It  moves  itself."  About  a 
month  after  this  the  father  set  about  testing  the  state  of  his 
mind  by  asking  him  whether  trees  did  not  feel  pain  when  they 
were  cut.  This  "  leading  question  "  was  not  to  entrap  Master 
C.,  who  answered  with  something  of  contempt  in  his  tone  : 
"No,  they  only  made  of  wood".  He  was  not  so  sure  about 
dead  rabbits,  however,  saying  first  "yes"  and  then  "no". 

The  intricate  relations  of  things  continued  to  trouble  his 
mind.  His  father  chanced  one  day  (end  of  eleventh  month)  to 
remark  at  table  that  C.  did  not  take  his  milk  so  nicely  as  he 
used  to  do.  C.  pondered  this  awhile  and  then  said:  "It's 
funny  that  little  babies  behave  better  than  big  boys.  They 
don't  know  so  much  as  boys."  From  which  the  father  appears 
to  have  inferred  that  children,  like  certain  Greek  philosophers, 
are  wont  to  identify  virtue  with  cognition. 

There  are  not  many  brilliant  strokes  of  childish  rationality 
to  record  during  this  year.  It  is  worth  noting,  perhaps,  that 
when  just  seven  months  and  one  week  of  the  year  had  passed, 
he  showed  that  he  had  found  his  own  way  to  an  axiomatic 
truth  familiar  to  students  of  geometry.  He  had  been  to  the 
circus  the  day  before,  where  a  gorgeous  pantomimic  spectacle 
had  greatly  delighted  him.  He  talked  to  his  father  of  the 
beautiful  things,  and  among  others,  of  "  the  fairies  going  up  in 
the  air  ".  His  father  asked  him  how  they  were  able  to  fly. 
Whereupon  with  that  good-natured  readiness  to  enlighten  the 
darkness  of  grown-up  people  which  makes  the  child  the  most 
charming  of  instructors,  he  proceeded  to  explain  in  this  wise  : 


460  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

"  They  had  wings,  you  know.  Angels  have  wings  like  birds, 
and  fairies  are  like  angels,  and  so  you  see  fairies  are  like 
birds." 

The  first  development  of  reason  in  the  child  is  apt  to  be 
trying  to  parents  and  others,  on  account  not  only  of  the  thick 
hail-like  pelting  of  questions  to  which  it  gives  rise,  but  still 
more,  perhaps,  of  the  circumstance  that  the  young  reasoner 
will  so  readily  turn  his  new  instrument  to  a  confusing  criti- 
cism of  his  elders.  The  daring  interference  of  childish 
dialectic  with  moral  discipline  in  C.'s  case  has  already  been 
touched  on.  Sometimes  he  would  follow  up  a  series  of 
questions  so  as  to  put  his  logical  antagonist  into  a  corner, 
very  much  after  the  manner  of  the  astute  Socrates.  Here  is 
an  example  of  this  highly  inconvenient  mode  of  dialectical 
attack  (middle  of  seventh  month).  He  was  at  this  time  like 
other  children,  much  troubled  about  the  killing  of  animals  for 
food.  Again  and  again  he  would  ask  with  something  of 
fierce  impatience  in  his  voice  :  "  Why  do  people  kill  them  ?  " 
On  one  occasion  he  had  plied  his  mother  with  these  questionings. 
He  then  contended  that  people  who  eat  meat  must  like  animals 
to  be  killed.  Finally,  to  clench  the  matter,  he  turned  on  his 
mother  and  asked  :  "  Do  you  like  them  to  be  killed  ?  "  Here 
is  another  example  of  his  persistent  dialectical  attack  (end  of 
eleventh  month).  A  small  caterpillar  happening  to  drop  on 
the  shoulder  of  the  father,  the  mother  expressed  the  common  dis- 
like for  these  creatures.  C.  was  just  now  championing  the  whole 
dumb  creation  against  hard-hearted  man,  and  he  at  once  saw  his 
opportunity.  '  Why,'  he  demanded  in  his  peremptory  catechising 
tone, '  don't  you  like  caterpillars  ? '  To  which  the  mother,  amused 
perhaps  with  his  grave  argumentative  manner,  thought  to 
escape  the  attack  by  answering  playfully:  "Because  they 
make  the  butterflies  ".  But  there  was  no  room  for  jocosity  in 
C.'s  mind  when  it  was  a  matter  of  liking  or  disliking  a  living 
creature.  So  he  followed  up  his  questioning  with  the  true 
Socratic  irony,  asking  :  "  Why  don't  you  like  butterflies  ?  " 
On  this  both  the  parents  appear  to  have  laughed  ;  but  he  was 
not  to  be  upset,  and  ignoring  the  patent  subterfuge  of  the 
butterfly  returned  to  the  caterpillar.  "  Caterpillars,"  he  ob- 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  461 

served  thoughtfully,  "don't  make  a  noise."  He  had  doubtless 
generalised  that  the  pet  aversions  of  his  parents,  more  especi- 
ally his  father,  were  dogs,  cocks  and  other  noise-producing 
animals.  Whether  he  returned  to  the  subject  of  the  caterpillar 
is  not  stated.  Perhaps  his  mother's  dislike  for  the  wee  soft 
noiseless  thing  was  to  be  added  to  the  stock  of  unexplained 
childish  mysteries. 

Passing  to  manifestations  of  feeling,  we  have  a  curious 
note  on  a  new  emotional  expression.  It  seems  that  when  a 
suckling  the  child  had  got  into  the  way  of  accompanying  the 
bliss  of  an  ambrosial  meal  by  soft  caressing  movements  of  the 
fore-finger  along  the  mother's  eyebrows.  When  three  years 
and  ten  months  old  he  was  sitting  on  his  father's  lap  in  one  of 
his  softer  moods  when  he  touched  this  parent's  eyebrows  in  the 
same  dainty  caressing  manner.  The  observer  suspects  that 
we  have  here  an  example  of  a  movement  becoming  an 
emotional  sign  by  association  and  analogy.  At  first  asso- 
ciated with  the  ne  plus  ultra  of  infantile  happiness  it  came  to 
indicate  the  oncoming  of  any  analogous  state  of  feeling,  and 
especially  of  the  luxurious  mood  of  tenderness. 

Two  or  three  curious  examples  of  fear  are  recorded  in  this 
chapter.  In  the  second  week  of  the  fourth  month  he  went  with 
his  mother  to  the  photographer's  to  have  his  likeness  taken. 
When  he  reached  the  house  he  strongly  objected,  clung  to  his 
mother  and  showed  all  the  signs  of  a  true  fear.  On  entering 
the  room  he  told  the  photographer  in  his  quiet  authoritative 
manner  that  he  was  not  going  to  have  his  likeness  taken.  The 
process,  an  instantaneous  one,  was  accomplished,  however, 
without  his  knowing  it.  Next  morning  when  asked  by  his 
sister  how  he  liked  having  his  likeness  taken,  he  answered 
snappishly  :  "  Haven't  had  my  likeness  taken.  Don't  you  see  I 
can  talk  ?  "  The  father  suspects  that  the  child  feared  he  would 
be  transformed  by  the  black  art  of  the  camera  into  a  speechless 
photograph.  It  is  curious  that  savages  appear  to  show  a  similar 
dread  of  the  photographic  camera.  Thus,  in  a  recent  number 
of  the  Graphic  (November,  1893)  there  was  a  drawing  of 
Europeans  and  natives  having  their  likeness  taken  in  a  camp 
in  South  Africa.  One  native,  terror-struck,  is  hiding  behind  a 


462  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

tree  so  as  not  to  be  taken.  The  text  explains  that  the  drawing 
represents  a  real  incident,  and  that  the  fear  of  the  native  came 
from  his  belief  that  there  is  an  evil  spirit  in  the  camera,  and 
adds  that,  on  finding  out  that  after  all  he  was  in  the  group, 
the  poor  fellow  instantly  disappeared  from  the  camp.  Is  there 
not  for  all  of  us  something  uncanny  in  that  black  box  turned 
towards  us  bent  on  snatching  from  us  the  film  or  image  of  our 
very  self  ? 

The  other  instances  of  C.'s  fear  point  to  a  like  superstitious 
frame  of  mind  at  this  time.  Thus  in  the  last  month  he 
happened  one  day  to  see  some  white  linen  swaying  in  the 
breeze  on  a  hill  not  far  off.  He  took  it  for  a  light  and  was 
afraid,  saying  it  was  a  wolf.  This  was,  we  are  told,  his  first 
experience  of  ghosts.  At  the  same  date  he  showed  fear  when 
passing  through  a  wood  with  his  father  about  nine  o'clock  on  a 
summer  evening.  Though  his  father  was  carrying  him  he 
said  he  could  not  help  being  afraid  of  the  dark.  He  fancied 
there  must  be  wolves  in  the  dark.  He  afterwards  informed  his 
father  that  his  sister  had  told  him  so.  The  wolf  appears  at 
this  time  (by  a  quaint  confusion  of  zoology)  to  have  been  the 
descendant  of  his  old  bete  noire,  the  "bow-wow".  "Have 
we,"  writes  the  father,  "  a  sort  of  parallel  here  to  the  super- 
stition of  the  were-wolf  so  familiar  in  folk-lore  ?  " 

A  new  development  of  angry  outburst  is  recorded.  In  the 
third  month,  to  the  horror  of  his  parents  and  the  disgust  of  his 
sister,  he  positively  took  to  biting  others,  an  action,  it  is  need- 
less to  say,  which  he  could  not  have  picked  up  from  his  highly 
respectable  human  environment.  Was  this,  asks  the  father, 
with  praiseworthy  detachment  of  mind,  an  instinct,  a  survival 
of  primitive  brute-like  habit,  and  happily  destined  in  the  case 
of  a  child  born  into  a  civilised  society,  like  other  instincts,  as 
pilfering,  to  be  rudimentary  and  transient  ? 

As  implied  in  the  account  of  his  much  questioning,  the 
feeling  which  was  most  strongly  marked  and  dominant  during 
this  year  was  wonder.  His  father  would  surprise  him  some- 
times standing  on  the  sofa  and  looking  at  an  engraving  of 
Guide's  "Aurora"  hanging  on  the  wall  above.  The  woman's 
figure  in  front,  perfectly  buoyant  on  the  air,  the  horses  and 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  463 

chariot  firmly  planted  on  the  cloud,  all  this  fascinated  his 
attention  and  filled  him  with  delightful  astonishment. 

With  wonder  there  often  went  in  these  days  sore  perplexity 
of  spirit.  The  order  of  things  was  not  only  intricate  and 
difficult  to  take  apart,  it  seemed  positively  wrong.  That 
animals  should  be  beaten,  slaughtered,  eaten  by  his  own  kith 
and  kin,  this,  as  already  hinted,  filled  him  with  dismay.  In 
odd  contrast  to  this,  he  would  protest  with  equal  warmth 
against  any  ordinance  which  affected  his  own  comfort.  Thus, 
having  on  one  occasion  (middle  of  seventh  month)  taken  a 
lively  interest  in  the  manufacture  of  jellies,  custards,  and  other 
dainties,  and  having  learned  the  next  day  that  they  had  been 
disposed  of  by  a  company  of  guests,  he  asked  his  mother  queru- 
lously why  she  had  "  wisitors,"  and  then  added  in  a  comical 
tone  of  self-compassion,  "  Didn't  the  '  wisitors  '  know  you  had 
a  little  boy  ?  "  "  It  is  odd  to  note,"  writes  the  father,  "  how  a 
humane  concern  for  the  lower  creation  coexisted  with  utter 
indifference  to  the  duties  of  hospitality.  Perhaps,  however," 
he  adds,  succumbing  to  paternal  weakness,  and  saying  the 
best  he  can  for  his  boy,  "  there  was  no  real  contradiction  here. 
The  compassionateness  of  childhood  goes  forth  to  weak, 
defenceless  things,  and  to  C.'s  mind  the  '  wisitors  '  may  very 
likely  have  appeared  as  over-fed,  greedy  monsters  who  robbed 
poor  children  of  their  small  perquisites." 

The  wondering  impulse  of  the  child  assumed  now  and 
again  a  quasi-religious  form  in  speculations  about  death  and 
heaven.  Early  in  the  year  he  had  lost  his  grandpapa  by 
sudden  death,  and  the  event  set  his  thoughts  in  this  direction. 
In  the  ninth  month  his  mother  read  him  Wordsworth's  well- 
known  story,  "  Lucy  Gray ".  He  was  much  saddened  by 
the  account  of  Lucy's  death.  On  hearing  the  line  "  In  heaven 
we  all  shall  meet,''  he  began  questioning  his  mother  about 
heaven.  She  gave  him  the  popular  description  of  heaven,  but 
apparently  in  a  way  that  left  him  uncertain  as  to  whether  she 
believed  what  she  said.  Whereupon  he  exclaimed:  'We  shall 
meet,'  and  then  after  a  moment's  pause,  as  though  not  quite 
certain,  added,  '  shan't  we  ?  '  Five  weeks  later,  when  driving 
in  the  country  with  his  mother  on  a  lovely  May  day,  he  was 


464  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

in  his  happiest  mood,  looking  at  the  flowers  in  the  fields  and 
hedgerows,  and  suddenly  exclaimed  :  "  I  shall  never  die  !  " 
The  -question  of  immortality  (observes  the  father)  had  thus 
early  begun  to  wring  the  child's  soul. 

There  are,  I  regret  to  say,  in  this  chapter,  hardly  any  re- 
marks about  the  development  of  the  child's  will  and  moral 
character.  The  father  appears  to  have  been  disproportionately 
interested  in  the  boy's  intellectual  advancement.  The  reader 
is  left  to  hope  that  Master  C.  was  growing  a  more  orderly  and 
law-abiding  child  than  the  incident  of  the  biting  would  suggest. 
The  one  remark  which  can  be  brought  under  this  head  refers 
to  the  growth  of  practical  intelligence  in  applying  rules  to 
action.  C.  had  been  told  it  was  well  to  keep  nice  things  to  the 
end,  and  he  proceeded  to  work  out  the  consequences  of  the 
rule  in  an  amusing  fashion.  Thus  we  read  (end  of  eleventh 
month)  that  he  would  take  all  the  currants  out  of  his  cake  and 
stick  them  round  the  corner  of  his  plate  so  as  to  eat  them  last. 
A  still  more  amusing  instance  of  the  same  thing  occurred  about 
the  same  date.  On  putting  him  to  bed  one  evening  his  mother 
noticed  that  he  carefully  sought  out  the  middle  of  the  bed,  say- 
ing to  himself,  "  I'll  keep  these  last".  Questioned  by  her  as 
to  what  he  meant  by  '  these,'  he  explained,  "  These  nice  cool 
places  at  the  edge  of  the  bed".  "Children,"  remarks  the 
chronicler,  "  do  not  drop  their  originality  even  when  they 
make  a  show  of  following  our  lead.  Obedience  would  be  far 
more  tedious  than  it  is  but  for  the  occasional  opportunities  of  a 
play  of  inventive  fancy  in  the  application  of  a  rule  to  new  and 
out-of-the-way  cases." 

Fifth    Year. 

With  the  fifth  year  we  enter  upon  a  new  phase  of  the  diary. 
The  father  appears  now  to  have  finally  abandoned  the  trans- 
parent pretence  of  a  methodical  record  of  progress,  and  he 
limits  himself  to  a  fuller  account  of  a  few  selected  incidents. 
Very  noticeable  is  the  introduction  of  something  like  prolonged 
dialogue  between  the  child  and  one  of  his  parents. 

The  boy  continued  to  take  a  lively  interest  in  objects  and 
to  note  them  with  care.  Here  is  an  illustration  of  his  atten- 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A    FATHER'S   DIARY.  465 

tion  to  natural  phenomena.  He  was  walking  out  (end  of  fifth 
month)  with  his  father  on  their  favourite  Heath  towards  sunset, 
when  he  asked  :  "  What  are  these  pretty  things  I  see  after 
looking  at  the  sun  ?  When  I  move  my  eyes  they  begin  to 
move  about."  The  father  said  he  might  call  them  fairy  suns. 
He  then  wanted  to  know  whether  they  were  real.  He  said  : 
"  When  they  seem  to  be  on  the  path  they  disappear  when  I  go 
up  to  them  ".  Later  on  he  began  to  romance  about  the 
spectral  discs  that  he  saw  after  looking  at  a  red  sun,  calling 
them  fire  balloons  and  saying  that  there  was  a  fairy  in  each 
one  of  them.1 

A  quaint  example  of  his  attention  to  the  form  of  objects, 
as  well  as  of  his  odd  childish  mode  of  thought,  comes  out  in 
a  talk  with  his  mother  (end  of  seventh  month).  She  had  been 
reading  to  him  from  Alice  in  Wonderland,  where  the  caterpillar 
tells  Alice  that  one  side  of  a  mushroom  would  make  her  grow 
taller,  and  one  side  shorter,  which  set  Alice  wondering  what  the 
side  of  a  mushroom  could  be.  C.  could  not  sympathise  with 
Alice's  perplexity,  and  said  to  his  mother  :  "  Why,  a  mushroom 
is  all  ends  and  sides.  Wherever  you  stand  it's  an  end  or  a 
side."  The  father  thinks  he  sees  here  a  dim  apprehension  of 
the  idea  that  a  circle  is  formed  by  an  infinite  number  of  straight 
lines,  but  he  is  possibly  reading  too  much  into  the  boy's  thought. 

His  observation  of  colour  continued.  One  day  (end  of 
seventh  month)  he  was  overheard  by  his  father  saying  to  him- 
self (without  any  suggestion  from  another)  that  a  particular 
colour  "  came  next "  to  another.  His  father  thereupon  ques- 
tioned him  and  elicited  that  orange  came  next  to  red.  Asked 
'  What  else  ?  '  he  answered  yellow.  Dark  brown  came  next  to 
black,  a  lighter  brown  to  red,  purple  next  to  blue,  pink  to  red, 
and  so  forth.  Asked  what  green  came  next  to,  he  answered  : 
"  I  don't  know  "  ;  from  which  it  would  appear  that  he  had 
pretty  clearly  observed  the  affinities  of  colours. 

He  showed  himself  observant  of  people's  ways  too.  Here 
is  a  funny  example  of  his  attention  to  his  sister's  habits  of 
speech.  One  evening  (end  of  sixth  month)  when  his  sister  was 
out  at  a  party  he  had  a  cracker  which  he  wished  to  give  her 

1  Compare  above,  p.  102  f. 
30 


466  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

"  as  a  surprise  ".  So  he  told  his  mother  to  put  it  under  the 
table,  and  added:  "When  E.  comes  in,  and  after  she  says, 
'  Well !  how've  you  been  getting  on  ?  '  then  you  must  say  : 
'  Look  under  the  table'  ". 

His  memory,  as  the  foregoing  incident  may  show,  was 
growing  tenacious  and  exact.  This  exactitude  showed  itself  in 
almost  a  pedantic  fashion  with  respect  to  words.  Here  is  a 
funny  example  (end  of  sixth  month).  He  had  a  new  story- 
book, The  Princess  Nobody,  illustrated  by  R.  Doyle.  His 
mother  had  read  it  to  him  about  four  or  five  times  during  the 
three  weeks  he  had  possessed  it.  One  Sunday  evening  his 
father  read  it  to  him  as  a  treat.  In  one  place  the  story  runs  : 
"  One  day  when  the  king  had  been  counting  out  his  money  all 
day,"  which  the  father  carelessly  read  as  "  counting  out  all 
his  money  ".  The  child  at  once  pulled  up  and  corrected  his 
sire,  saying,  "  No,  papa,  'tis  '  counting  out  all  the  day  his 
money  '  ".  He  had  remembered  the  ideas  and  the  words  though 
not  the  precise  order.  The  jealous  regard  of  the  child  for  the 
text  of  his  sacred  books  in  the  face  of  would-be  mutilators  is 
one  of  those  traits  which,  while  perfectly  childish,  have  a 
quaint  old-fashioned  look. 

The  dreamy  worship  of  fairies  passed  into  a  new  and  even 
more  blissful  phase  this  year.  Before  the  close  of  the  third 
month  C.  was  actually  brought  into  contact  with  one  of  these 
dainty  white-clad  beings.  The  memorable  occasion  was  a 
girl's  costume  ball,  to  which  he  was  taken  as  a  spectator. 
Among  the  younger  girls  present  was  one  dressed  as  a  fairy, 
in  short  white  gauze,  golden  crown,  and  the  rest.  C.  was  at 
first  dazed  by  the  magnificence  of  the  assembly  and  shrank 
back  shyly  to  his  mother's  side;  but  after  this  white  sylph  had 
been  pointed  out  to  him  as  a  fairy,  and  when  she  came  up  to 
him  and  spoke  to  him,  he  was  transported  with  delight. 
Hitherto  the  fairy  had  never  been  nearer  to  him  than  on  a 
circus  stage :  now  he  had  one  close  to  him  and  actually  talked 
with  her  !  He  firmly  believed  in  the  supernatural  character  of 
this  small  person,  and  on  his  return  home  proceeded  to  tell 
cook  with  radiant  face  how  he  had  seen  a  live  fairy  and  spoken 
to  her.  He  added  that  his  sister  had  never  spoken  to  one. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  467 

This  last  might  easily  look  like  a  touch  ot  malicious  '  crowing ' : 
yet  the  father  appears  to  think  that  the  boy  meant  only  to 
deepen  the  mystery  of  the  revelation  by  pointing  out  that  it 
was  without  precedent. 

The  weaving  of  fairy  legend  now  went  on  vigorously. 
Sometimes  when  out  on  a  walk  and  observing  a  scene  he 
would  suddenly  drop  into  his  dream-mood  and  spin  a  pretty 
romance.  This  happened  one  Sunday  in  winter  (beginning  of 
seventh  month),  as  he  stood  and  watched  the  skaters  on  a 
pond.  He  said  his  fairies  could  skate,  and  he  talked  more 
particularly  of  his  favourite  Pinkbill,  whom,  he  said,  he 
now  saw  skating,  though  nobody  else  was  privileged  to  see 
her,  and  who  loved  to  skate  at  night  on  tiny  pools  which  were 
quite  big  for  her.  "  Delightful  days  (writes  the  father,  who 
is  rather  apt  to  gush  in  these  later  chapters),  when  one  holds 
a  wondrous  world  of  beauty  in  one's  own  breast,  safe  from  all 
prying  eyes,  to  be  whispered  of  perhaps  to  one's  dearest,  but 
never  to  be  shown." 

The  full  enjoyment  of  this  supernal  world  was  during  sleep. 
C.  often  spoke  of  his  lovely  dreams.  One  morning  (middle  of 
fourth  month)  when  still  in  bed,  he  engaged  his  mother  in  the 
following  talk  :  C.  "  Do  you  have  beautiful  dreams,  mamma?" 
Mother.  "  No,  dear,  I  don't  dream  much."  C.  "  Oh,  if  you 
want  to  dream  you  must  hide  your  head  in  the  pillow  and  shut 
your  eyes  tight."  Mother.  "  Is  dreaming  as  good  as  hearing 
stories  ?  "  C.  "  Oh,  yes,  I  should  think  so.  One  gets  to  know 
about  all  sorts  of  things  one  didn't  know  anything  about 
before."  Dreams  (writes  the  father)  came  to  him  like  his  fire- 
balloons  by  shutting  his  eyes  tight,  and  perhaps  his  story- 
books were  the  real  suns  of  which  his  dreams  were  the  '  after- 
images '. 

As  the  use  of  the  grown-up  and  high-bred  vocable  "  one  " 
— the  first  instance  observed,  by-the-bye, — suggests,  C.  was 
making  rapid  strides  in  the  use  of  language.  By  the  middle 
of  the  year,  we  are  told,  he  could  articulate  all  sounds  including 
the  initial  y  and  th  when  he  tried  to  do  so.  He  gave  to  the  a 
sound  an  unusual  degree  of  broadness,  a  fact  which  lent  to  his 
speech  a  comical  air  of  learned  superiority.  This  was  of  course 


468  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

especially  the  case  when,  as  still  happened,  he  would  slip  into 
such  solecisms  as  '  I  were  '  and  '  Weren't  I  ?  '  He  would  still 
use  some  quaint  original  expressions.  It  may  interest  the 
philologist  to  know  that  he  quite  spontaneously  got  into  the 
way  of  using  '  spend  '  for  '  cost,'  as  in  asking  one  day  (begin- 
ning of  third  month),  on  seeing  a  frill  in  a  shop  window  : 
'  How  much  does  this  frill  spend  ?  '  and  also  of  making  '  learn' 
do  duty  for  '  teach,'  as  when  (end  of  tenth  month)  he  asked 
his  mother,  pointing  to  a  globe :  "  When  are  you  going  to 
learn  me  that  ball  ?  " 

He  continued  quite  seriously  and  with  no  thought  of  pro- 
ducing an  effect  to  frame  new  words  more  or  less  after  the 
analogy  of  those  in  use.  Thus  one  day  (middle  of  third  month) 
he  surprised  his  parents  by  bringing  out  the  verb  '  firework- 
ing  '  in  reference  to  the  coming  festivities  of  the  fifth  of  Novem- 
ber. Sometimes,  too,  he  would  amuse  them  by  trotting  out 
some  '  grown-up  '  phrase  which  he  generally  used  with  clear 
insight,  though  now  and  again  he  would  miss  the  precise  shade 
of  meaning.  Thus  it  happened  (about  middle  of  fifth  month) 
that  he  had  been  taking  tea  at  the  house  of  some  girl  friends, 
and  on  his  return  his  mother  questioned  him  about  his  doings, 
and  in  particular  what  his  host  had  said  to  him.  C.  pondered 
for  a  moment  and  then  said  :  "  Oh  !  nothing  surprising". 

This  progress  in  the  use  of  language  indicated  a  higher 
power  of  mental  abstraction.  This  was  seen  among  other 
ways  in  the  attainment  of  much  clearer  ideas  about  number. 
In  the  second  month  of  the  year  he  was  able,  we  are  told,  to 
define  the  relations  of  the  simpler  numbers,  saying  that  four 
was  one  less  than  five,  and  so  on.  That  he  had  his  own  way 
of  counting  is  evident  from  the  following  story,  which  dates 
from  the  middle  of  the  same  month.  When  walking  with  his 
mother  on  the  Heath  he  found  four  crab  apples.  He  observed  to 
her  :  "  How  nice  it  would  be,  mamma,  if  I  could  find  two 
more!"  His  mother  replied:  "Yes.  How  many  would  you 
have  then,  C.  ? ''  To  this  C.  responded  in  his  grave  business- 
like tone  :  "  Wait  a  minute,"  then  got  down  on  his  knees,  put 
the  four  apples  in  a  row,  and  then  proceeded  to  the  mysterious 
ceremony  of  counting.  He  began  by  saying  '  one,  two  '  to 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  469 

himself,  then  on  reaching  the  "  three  "  he  pointed  to  the  first 
of  the  row,  using  the  apples  to  help  him  in  adding  the  four 
last  digits.  He  appears,  says  the  father,  to  have  imagined  or 
'  visualised  '  the  first  two  units,  and  then  used  the  visible 
objects  for  the  rest  of  the  operation — not  a  bad  way,  one  would 
say,  of  turning  the  apples  to  this  simple  arithmetical  use. 

That  he  visualised  distinctly  when  counting  is  illustrated 
by  another  incident  dating  three  weeks  later.  His  mother, 
as  was  her  wont,  was  seeing  him  into  bed.  Before 
climbing  on  to  the  bed  he  put  on  the  coverlid  a  number  of 
small  toy  treasures.  When  tucked  up  he  opened  up  the  follow- 
ing dialogue.  C.  "  Put  my  toys  in  the  drawer,  mamma." 
M.  "  I  have  done  it,  dear."  C.  "  How  many  were  there  ? " 
M.  'Three.'  C.  "Oh  no,  there  were  four."  M.  "Are  you 
sure,  dear  ?  What  were  they  ?  "  C.,  after  sitting  up  and 
pointing  successively  to  imaginary  objects  on  the  coverlid  : 
*'  One,  two,  three,  four, — two  dollies,  a  tin  soldier,  and  a 
shell". 

His  interest  in  physical  phenomena  continued  to  manifest 
itself  in  questionings.  He  would  spring  his  problems  in  physics 
on  his  patient  parents  at  the  most  unexpected  moments. 
For  instance,  when  sitting  at  table  one  day  (end  of  first  month) 
he  observed  quite  suddenly,  and  in  no  discoverable  connexion 
with  what  had  been  happening  before  :  "  There's  one  thing 
I  can't  imagine.  How  is  it,  papa,  that  when  we  put  our  hand 
into  the  water  we  don't  make  a  hole  in  it  ?  "  It  would  be 
curious  to  know  how  the  father  dealt  with  this  hydrostatic 
problem. 

The  other  inquiries  recorded  about  this  time  have,  odclly 
enough,  to  do  with  water.  It  looks  as  if  water  were  dividing 
with  number  just  now  the  activity  of  his  brain.  Thus  he 
asked  one  day  when  staying  at  the  sea-side  (middle  of  second 
month)  :  "  How  does  all  the.  water  come  into  the  world  ? '» 
His  mind  was  also  greatly  exercised  about  the  hydrostatic 
puzzle  of  things  sinking  and  swimming  (floating). 

There  are  hardly  any  examples  of  a  reasoning  process  this 
year.  One  of  these,  however,  is  perhaps  characteristic  enough  to 
deserve  reproduction.  One  day  (middle  of  fourth  month)  when 


4/0  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

his  mind  was  running  on  the  great  problems  of  counting,  his- 
sister  happened  to  speak  about  a  large  number  of  chestnuts 
(over  200).  This  excited  C.'s  imagination,  and  he  exclaimed  : 
"  Why,  even  Goliath  couldn't  count  them  ".  The  idea  that 
mere  bulk  should  measure  intellectual  capacity  was  delicious, 
and  C.'s  remark  was  no  doubt  received  with  a  peal  of  laughter 
to  which  the  bewildered  little  inquirer  into  the  mysteries  of  things 
must  by  this  time  have  been  getting  hardened.  And  yet,  writes 
the  apologetic  father,  C.'s  reasoning  was  not  so  utterly  silly  as 
it  looks,  for  in  his  daily  measurement  of  his  own  faculties  with 
those  of  others  what  had  impressed  him  most  deeply  was 
that  knowledge  is  the  prerogative  of  big  folk. 

With  respect  to  C.'s  emotional  development  during  this 
year,  I  am  -pleased  to  be  able  to  record  a  diminution  in  the 
outbursts  of  angry  passion.  There  seems  to  have  been  no 
more  biting,  and  altogether  he  was  growing  less  homicidal  and 
more  human.  It  is  only  to  be  expected  that  the  father  should  set 
down  these  paroxysms  of  rage  to  temporary  physical  conditions- 

Among  feelings  which  were  still  strong  and  frequently 
manifested  was  fear.  He  had  no  fear  of  the  dark,  and  did 
not  in  the  least  mind  being  left  alone  when  put  to  bed.  But 
he  was  weakly  timid  in  relation  to  other  things,  e.g.,  the 
tepid  morning  bath,  from  which  he  shrank  as  from  a  horror. 
His  bravery  was  as  yet  an  infinitesimal  quantity,  as  we  may 
see  from  the  following  anecdote.  His  mother  was  one  day 
(end  of  fourth  month)  talking  to  him  about  the  self-denying 
bravery  of  captains  of  ships  when  shipwrecked.  She  asked 
him  whether  he  would  not  like  to  be  brave  too,  adding 
for  his  encouragement  that  many  timid  little  boys  like  him  had 
grown  up  to  be  brave  men.  Upon  this  I  regret  to  say  that 
C.  asked  sceptically,  "  Do  they  ?  "  and  then  added,  with  a  little 
impatient  wriggle  of  his  body,  "  I  am  going  to  be  a  painter, 
and  painters  don't  need  to  be  brave  ".  The  mother  pursued 
the  subject  saying  :  "  But  if  when  you  are  big  we  all  go  to 
sea  and  get  shipwrecked,  wouldn't  you  wish  mamma  and  E. 
to  get  into  the  boat  before  you  ? "  C.  managed  to  parry  even 
this  home-drive,  answering:  "  Oh,  yes,  but  I  should  get  in  the 
very  minute  after  you  ". 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  471 

A  noticeable  change  occurred  during  this  period  in  what 
the  Germans  call  "  self-feeling  ".  A  consciousness  of  growing 
power  gave  a  certain  feeling  of  dignity  and  even  of  superiority 
which  often  betrayed  itself  in  his  words  and  actions.  Although, 
so  far  as  I  can  gather,  a  pretty  boy,  and  a  good  deal  admired 
for  his  golden  hair,  he  does  not  seem  to  have  set  much  store 
by  his  good  looks.  One  day  (towards  end  of  sixth  month)  a 
grown-up  cousin  remarked  at  table  that  he  had  had  his  hair 
cut  :  whereupon  ensued  this  talk.  Mother  (to  cousin).  "  It 
looks  better  now  that  it  is  cut."  C.  "  Oh,  no,  it  was  prettier 
before."  Cousin.  "  Oh,  you  think  you've  got  pretty  hair." 
C.  (unhesitatingly).  "Oh,  yes."  Cousin.  "  Who  told  you  your 
hair  was  pretty  ?  "  C.  "  Mamma."  "  All  this,"  writes  the 
father,  "  was  said  very  quietly,  and  without  the  least  appear- 
ance of  vanity.  He  might  have  been  talking  about  the  hair  of 
another  person,  or  of  a  head  in  one  of  his  pictures.  His  interest 
here  seemed  to  be  much  more  in  correcting  his  mother  and 
bringing  her  into  consistency  with  former  statements  than  in 
laying  claim  to  prettiness." 

On  the  other  hand,  the  child  does  certainly  appear  to  have 
plumed  himself  a  good  deal  on  his  intellectual  possessions.  It 
is  to  be  noted  that  about  this  time  he  grew  unpleasantly 
assertive  and  controversial.  He  would  even  sometimes  stick 
to  his  own  view  of  things  when  contradicted  by  his  parents. 
He  prided  himself  more  particularly  on  being  "  sensible," 
as  he  called  it.  His  eagerness  to  be  thought  so  may  be 
illustrated  by  the  following  incident.  He  and  his  mother  had 
been  reading  a  story  in  which  a  little  girl  speaks  of  her  mother 
as  the  best  mother  in  the  world.  Whereupon  in  a  weak 
moment  his  mother  asked  him,  "  Do  you  think  your  mother 
the  best  in  the  world,  dear?"  To  this  C.  replied,  "Well,  I 
think  you  are  good,  but  not  the  best  in  the  world.  That  would 
not  be  sensible,  would  it,  mamma  ?  "  We  are  not  told  how 
this  Cordelia-like  moderation  was  received. 

To  many  people,  mothers  especially,  there  might  well 
seem  to  be  a  touch  of  the  prig  in  this  exact  weighing  of  words 
when  it  was  a  question  only  of  the  exaggeration  of  love.  I  regret 
to  say  that  about  this  same  time  a  tendency  to  priggishness 


472  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

did  certainly  show  itself  in  a  critical  air  of  superiority  to- 
wards girls  of  his  own  age.  When  about  four  years  eight 
months  he  was  sent  to  stay  for  a  few  days  at  the  house  of  a 
lady  friend  where  there  was  a  girl  about  his  own  age,  who 
seems  to  have  been  a  lively  mischievous  young  person, 
delighting  in  'drawing'  her  grave  boy  comrade.  On  his  return 
home  he  entertained  his  mother  by  expressing  his  feeling 
respecting  his  new  companion.  He  said  :  "  I  don't  like  E.'s 
looks.  She  looks  naughty.  Her  cheeks  look  naughty  "  (and 
he  puffed  out  his  own  cheeks  by  way  of  illustration).  He 
added :  "  She  looks  naughty  about  here,"  pointing  to  his 
forehead  just  above  the  eyes.  He  then  proceeded  to  describe 
the  measures  he  had  taken  for  correcting  her  naughtiness. 

"  One  day,"  he  said,  "  when  she  was  naughty,  I  told  her 
about  dynamite  men,  and  she  was  naughty  after  that.  And 
then  I  told  her  about  the  dynamite  men  being  put  in  prison, 
and  she  was  naughty  even  then."  On  this  his  mother  inter- 
posed :  "  Why  ever  did  you  talk  about  dynamite  men,  dear  ?  " 
C.  "  Because  I  thought  it  would  make  her  better.  Perhaps  if  I 
could  have  told  her  what  sort  of  a  place  a  prison  was  that 
would  have  made  her  better.  But  I  didn't  know."  Then  after 
a  pause  :  "  What  do  they  put  people  in  prison  for,  mamma  ?  " 

M.  "  For  stealing,  hurting  other  people,  and  telling 
stories." 

C.  (abruptly).  "  Oh,  E.  tells  a  lot  of  stories." 

M.  "  Oh  no,  E.  doesn't  tell  stories." 

C.  "  Yes,  she  does.  When  I  say  yes  she  says  no,  and  I 
know  that  I  am  right." 

He  talked  of  this  same  experience  of  feminine  frailty  to 
others,  remarking  to  one  of  his  lady  friends  that  E.  had  not 
said  a  sensible  thing  all  the  week  he  was  staying  with  her. 
He  also  attacked  his  father  on  the  subject,  and  after  illustrating 
her  odd  way  of  contradicting  others,  he  observed  :  "  She's  are 
never  as  sensible  as  he's,  I  suppose,  are  they,  papa  ?  especially 
if  a  boy  is  older  ". 

The  father  asked  him  if  he  had  shown  his  displeasure  to 
his  girl  playmate,  to  which  he  replied  :  "  I  didn't  show  my 
angriness;"  and  after  a  pause:  "I'd  better  not  show  how 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  473 

angry  I  can  be,  I'm  too  strong  and  too  big,  ain't  I  ?  "  As  a 
matter  of  fact  he  had  once,  at  least,  been  so  ungallant  as  to 
strike  his  companion  on  her  nose  with  one  of  his  toys,  select- 
ing this  objective  for  his  attack  apparently  for  no  other  reason 
than  that  it  was  already  disfigured  by  a  scratch.  He  wound 
up  this  disquisition  on  E.'s  shortcomings  by  an  attempt  at  a 
magnanimous  allowance  for  her  weakness :  "  I  b'lieve  she 
tries  not  to  say  these  things  because  she  knows  they  will  tease 
me,  but  I  think  she  can't  help  it ; "  and  he  repeated  this  as  if  to 
emphasise  the  point. 

Even  our  much-biassed  chronicler  is  obliged  to  own  that 
all  this  is  a  lamentable  exhibition  of  boyish  swagger,  and 
particularly  out  of  place  in  one  born  in  these  enlightened  days, 
when,  as  we  all  know,  '  she's '  are  as  good  as  '  he's,'  if  not  a 
great  deal  better.  The  only  palliation  of  the  unpleasant  picture 
of  coxcombry  which  he  offers  is  the  information  that  a  year 
or  too  later  C.'s  views  about  girls  were  profoundly  modified 
when  he  found  himself  in  a  school  where  a  girl  of  his  own  age 
could  beat  him  at  certain  things  of  the  mind. 

The  growing  vigour  of  his  self-consciousness  was  shown 
in  other  ways  too.  He  was  much  hurt  by  anything  which 
seemed  to  him  an  invasion  of  his  liberty.  About  the  end 
of  the  sixth  month,  we  read,  he  had  got  into  '  finicking ' 
ways  of  taking  his  food.  Thus  he  conceived  a  strong  dislike 
for  the  '  cream  '  on  his  boiled  milk.  If  anybody  attempted  to 
cross  him  in  these  faddish  ways  he  would  be  greatly  offended. 
It  looks  as  if  he  were  at  this  time  getting  a  keen  sense  of 
private  rights,  any  interference  withjwhich  he  regarded  as  an 
offence. 

The  story  about  what  he  would  do  if  his  family  were  ship- 
wrecked suggests  that  self-sacrifice  was  as  yet  not  a  strong 
element  in  the  boy's  moral  constitution.  Egoism,  it  might 
well  seem,  was  still  the  foundation  of  his  character.  This 
egoism  would  peep  out  now  and  again  in  his  talk.  One  day 
(middle  of  eighth  month)  when  the  family  was  lodging  in  a 
cottage  his  mother  had  reason  to  scold  him  for  walking  on  the 
flower-beds  in  the  cottage  garden.  Whereupon  he  answered  : 
"  It  isn't  your  garden,  it's  Mr.  G.'s  ".  To  this  the  mother 


474  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

observed  :  "  I  know,  dear,  but  I  have  to  be  all  the  more  par- 
ticular because  it  is  not  mine  "  ;  which  observation  drew  forth 
the  following  :  "  I  should  think  Mr.  G.  would  be  all  the  more 
particular  because  it  is  his  ".  It  was  evident,  writes  the  father, 
from  this  somewhat  cynical  observation  that  caring  for  things 
and  resenting  any  injury  to  them  seemed  to  C.  to  devolve  on 
the  owner  and  on  nobody  else. 

He  himself  certainly  did  repel  any  encroachment  on  his 
rights.  Here  is  an  amusing  illustration.  One  day  (the  end 
of  seventh  month)  he  was  playing  on  the  Heath  under 
the  eye  of  his  mother.  He  had  put  on  one  of  the  seats  a  lot 
of  grass  and  sand  as  fodder  for  his  wooden  horse.  While  he 
went  away  for  a  minute  a  strange  nurse  and  children  arrived, 
making  a  perfectly  legitimate  use  of  the  bench  by  seating 
themselves  on  it,  and  in  order  to  get  room  brushing  away  the 
precious  result  of  his  foraging  expedition.  On  coming  back 
and  seeing  what  had  happened  he  turned  to  his  mother  and 
swelling  with  indignation  exclaimed  loudly :  "  What  do  you 
mean  by  it,  letting  these  children  move  away  my  things  ?  " 
Of  course  this  was  intended  to  intimidate  the  real  culprits,  the 
children.  Finding  that  they  were  not  abashed  at  this,  but  on 
the  contrary  were  looking  at  one  another  with  a  look  of  high-bred 
astonishment,  he  turned  to  them  and  shouted  :  "  What  do  you 
mean  by  it  ?  "  This  outburst,  observes  the  father,  showed  a 
preternatural  heat  of  indignation,  for  in  general  he  was  very 
distant  and  reserved  towards  strange  children. 

Yet  C.  was  very  far  from  being  wholly  absorbed  in  himself 
and  his  own  interests.  It  cannot  be  said  indeed  that  self 
monopolised  the  intensest  of  his  feelings,  for  he  felt  just  as 
strongly  for  others  too.  There  was,  we  are  told,  a  marked 
development  of  sympathy  during  this  year.  His  sister  was 
now  away  from  home  at  school,  and  the  absence  seems  to  have 
drawn  out  kindly  feeling.  So  that  when,  on  one  occasion 
(middle  of  seventh  month),  his  father  and  aunt  were  going  to 
visit  her,  and  to  take  her  to  the  Crystal  Palace,  though  he 
wanted  dreadfully  to  go  himself,  he  made  a  great  effort,  and  in 
answer  to  his  father's  question,  what  message  he  had  for  his 
sister,  answered  a  little  tremulously,  "  Give  her  my  love,"  and 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  475 

then,  waxing  more  valiant,  added,  "I  hope  she  will  enjoy 
herself  at  Crystal  Palace  ". 

Some  months  later  (end  of  ninth  month),  he  proved  him- 
self considerate  for  his  father,  whose  repugnance  to  noises 
has  already  been  alluded  to.  A  man  had  come  to  repair  a 
window  and  his  father  had  been  forced  to  stop  his  work  and  to 
go  out.  On  his  return  C.  met  him  in  the  garden  and  asked  him 
loudly,  evidently  so  that  the  man  might  hear,  "  Does  that  man 
disturb  you,  papa  ?  "  He  had  previously  talked  to  his  mother 
in  an  indignant  way  about  the  noises  which  disturbed  his 
father.  About  a  fortnight  after  this,  on  hearing  some  children 
make  an  uproar  in  the  passage,  he  asked  indignantly,  "What 
are  those  children  about,  making  papa  not  do  his  work  ?  "  "  He 
was  at  this  time,"  writes  the  father,  "  transferring  some  of  that 
chivalrous  protection  which  he  first  bestowed  on  animals  to 
his  own  kith  and  kin.  He  became  to  me  just  at  this  time 
something  of  a  guardian  angel." 

His  compassion  for  the  lower  creation  had  meanwhile  by 
no  means  lessened.  Here  is  a  story  which  shows  how  the 
killing  of  animals  by  human  hands  still  tortured  his  young 
heart.  One  day  (towards  end  of  fourth  month)  he  was  looking 
at  his  beloved  picture-book  of  animals.  Apropos  of  a  picture 
of  some  seals  he  began  a  talk  with  his  mother  in  the  usual 
way  by  asking  her  a  question. 

C.  "  What  are  seals  killed  for,  mamma  ?  " 

M.  "  For  the  sake  of  their  skins  and  oil." 

C.  (turning  to  a  picture  of  a  stag).  "  Why  do  they  kill  the 
stags  ?  They  don't  want  their  skins,  do  they  ?  " 

M.  "  No,  they  kill  them  because  they  like  to  chase  them." 

C.  "  Why  don't  policemen  stop  them  ?  " 

M.  "  They  can't  do  that,  because  people  are  allowed  to  kill 
them." 

C.  (loudly  and  passionately).  "  Allowed,  allowed  ?  People 
are  not  allowed  to  take  other  people  and  kill  them." 

M.  "  People  think  there  is  a  difference  between  killing  men 
and  killing  animals." 

C.  was  not  to  be  pacified  this  way.  He  looked  woe-begone 
and  said  to  his  mother  piteously,  "  You  don't  understand  me  ". 


476  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

He  added  that  he  would  tell  his  friend  the  Heath-keeper  about 
these  things. 

The  father  observes  on  this  :  "There  was  something  almost 
heart-breaking  in  that  cry  '  You  don't  understand  me  '.  How 
can  we,  with  minds  blinded  by  our  conventional  habits  and 
prejudices,  hope  to  catch  the  subtle  and  divine  light  which  is 
reflected  from  the  untarnished  mirror  of  a  child's  mind  ?  "  Some- 
how, the  father's  sentimental  comments  seem  less  out  of  place 
here.  But  already  the  boy's  wrestlings  of  spirit  with  the 
dreadful '  must,'  which  turns  men  into  killers,  were  proving  too 
much  for  his  young  strength.  He  was  learning,  sullenly 
enough,  to  adjust  his  eye  to  the  inevitable  realities.  This 
accommodation  of  thought  to  stern  necessity  was  illustrated  by 
an  incident  which  occurred  at  the  end  of  the  fourth  month. 
He  had  had  some  leaden  soldiers  given  him  at  Christmas. 
Some  time  after  this  he  had  been  observed  to  break  off.  their 
guns.  His  mother  now  asked  him  why  he  had  broken  them 
off.  He  replied :  "  Oh  !  that  was  when  I  didn't  know  what 
soldiers  were  for,  when  I  thought  they  were  just  naughty  men 
who  liked  to  kill  people ".  On  his  mother  then  asking  him 
what  he  now  thought  soldiers  were  for,  he  explained  :  "  Oh  ! 
when  some  people  want  to  do  harm  to  some  other  people,  then 
those  other  people  must  send  their  soldiers  to  fight  them,  to 
stop  them  from  doing  harm  ". 

One  moral  quality  had,  it  seems,  always  been  distinctly 
marked  in  C.,  viz.,  a  scrupulous  regard  for  truth.  His  father 
believes  the  child  had  never  knowingly  made  a  false  statement, 
save  playfully,  when  throwing  for  a  moment  the  reins  on  the 
neck  of  fancy  and  allowing  it  to  come  dangerously  near  the 
confines  of  truth.  This  scrupulosity  the  father  connects, 
reasonably  enough,  with  certain  intellectual  qualities,  as  close 
observation  and  accurate  description  of  what  was  observed. 
Sometimes  this  scrupulous  veracity  would  display  itself  in 
a  quaint  form.  One  morning  (end  of  tenth  month)  C.  was 
obstinate  and  would  not  say  his  lesson  to  his  mother,  so  that 
she  had  to  threaten  him  with  forfeiture  of  his  toys  till  the 
lesson  was  got  through.  On  this  C.  said  rebelliously  :  "  Very 
well,  I  won't  say  them  ".  His  mother  then  talked  to  him 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  477 

about  his  naughtiness.  He  grew  very  unhappy,  and  said 
sobbing  and  looking  the  very  picture  of  misery  :  "  It's  a  good 
deal  worse  to  break  my  promise  than  not  to  say  my  lesson  ". 

Another  incident  of  about  the  same  date  throws  a  curious 
light  on  the  quality  of  his  moral  feeling  at  this  period.  He  had 
been  out  one  afternoon  in  the  garden  with  a  girl  companion  of 
about  his  own  age,  and  the  two  little  imps  between  them  had 
managed  to  strip  that  unpretending  garden  of  its  spring  glory, 
to  wit,  about  twenty  buds  of  peonies.  The  sacrilege  betrayed 
itself  in  C.'s  red-dyed  fingers.  A  condign  chastisement  was 
administered  by  the  mother,  and  the  culprit  was  sent  to  bed 
immediately  after  tea  in  the  hope  that  solitude  might  bring 
reflexion  and  remorse.  In  order  to  ensure  so  desirable  a 
result  the  mother  before  leaving  him  in  bed  enlarged  on  the 
heinousness  of  the  offence.  At  last  he  began  to  get  downright 
miserable,  and  the  mother,  expectant  of  a  confession  of  guilt, 
overheard  him  say  to  himself:  "I'm  so  sorry  I  picked  the 
flowers.  I  didn't  have  half  enough  tea."  The  next  day, 
referring  to  his  mischievous  act,  his  mother  happened  to  say  : 
"  You  were  not  sorry  for  it  at  the  time  ".  Whereupon  he 
burst  out  in  a  contemptuous  tone :  "  Eh  !  you  didn't  suppose  I 
was  sorry  at  the  time  ?  I  liked  doing  it."  "  Shocking  enough, 
no  doubt,"  writes  the  father  on  this  in  his  characteristic  manner, 
"  yet  may  we  not  see  in  this  defiant  avowal  of  enjoyment  in 
wrong-doing  the  germ  of  a  true  remorse,  which  in  its  essence 
is  the  resolute  confronting  of  the  lower  by  the  higher  self?" 

His  mind  was  still  occupied  about  the  mysteries  of  God, 
death,  and  heaven.  Following  the  example  of  his  sister  he 
would  occasionally  on  going  to  bed  quite  spontaneously  say 
his  prayers.  One  evening  at  the  end  of  the  eleventh  month, 
having  knelt  down  and  muttered  over  some  words,  he  asked 
his  mother  whether  she  had  heard  him.  She  said  no,  and  he 
remarked  that  he  had  not  wished  her  to  hear.  On  her  asking 
why  not,  he  rejoined  :  "  If  anybody  hears  what  I  say  perhaps 
God  won't  listen  to  me,"  which  seems  to  suggest  that  talking  to 
God  was  to  him  something  particularly  confidential,  what  he 
himself  once  described  as  telling  another  a  "  private  secret".1 

1  Compare  above,  p.  283  f. 


STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

When  his  mother  asked  him  what  he  had  been  praying  for  he 
said  it  was  for  a  fine  day  on  his  birthday.  He  thought  much 
of  God  as  the  maker  of  things,  and  wondered.  One  day 
(middle  of  tenth  month)  he  asked  how  God  made  us  and  "  put 
flesh  on  us,"  and  made  "  what  is  inside  us  ".  He  then  proceeded 
to  invent  a  little  theory  of  creation.  "  I  s'pose  he  made  stone 
men  and  iron  men  first,  and  then  made  real  men."  "  This 
myth,"  writes  the  father,  "  might  readily  suggest  that  the 
child  had  been  hearing  about  the  stone  and  the  iron  age,  and 
about  sculptors  first  modelling  their  statues  in  another  material. 
It  seems  probable,  however,  that  it  was  invented  by  a  purely 
childish  thought  as  a  way  of  clearing  up  the  mystery  of  the 
living  thinking  man."  There  is  subsequent  evidence  that 
his  theory  did  not  fully  satisfy  him.  In  the  eleventh  month  he 
continued  to  ask  how  God  made  things,  and  wanted  to  know 
whether  '  preachers  '  could  resolve  his  difficulty.  (His  sister 
appears  about  this  time  to  have  had  the  common  childish 
awe  for  the  clergy.)  On  learning  from  his  mother  that 
even  these  well-informed  persons  might  not  be  able  to  satisfy 
all  his  questions,  he  observed :  "  Well,  anyhow,  if  we  go  to 
heaven  when  we  die  we  shall  know,"  and  added  after  a  pause, 
"  and  if  we  don't  it  doesn't  much  matter".  "From  this," 
writes  the  father,  "  it  seems  fully  clear  that  the  child  was 
beginning  to  adjust  his  mind  to  the  fact  of  mystery,  to  the 
existence  of  an  impenetrable  region  of  the  unknown." 

C.'s  deepest  interest  just  now  in  religious  matters  grew  out 
of  the  feelings  awakened  by  the  thought  of  death.  In  the  early 
part  of  the  year  he  plied  his  mother  with  questions  about  death 
and  burial.  He  was  manifestly  troubled  about  the  prospect  of 
being  put  under  ground.  One  night  (end  of  third  month)  when 
his  mother  was  seeing  him  to  bed,  he  said :  "  Don't  put  earth 
on  my  face  when  I  am  buried  ".  The  touch  of  the  bed-clothes 
on  his  face  had  no  doubt  suggested  the  stifling  effect  of  the 
earth.  About  the  same  date  he  remarked  in  his  characteristic 
abrupt  manner,  after  musing  for  some  time:  "  Mamma,  perhaps 
the  weather  will  be  very,  very  fine,  much  finer  than  we  have 
ever  seen,  when  we  are  not  there  ".  The  mother  was  not  un- 
naturally puzzled  by  this  dark  utterance  and  asked  him  what 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  479 

he  meant.  He  replied  :  "  I  mean  when  we  are  buried,  and  then 
we  shall  be  very  sorry".  "Who  can  tell,"  writes  the  father. 
"  what  this  fancy  of  lying  under  the  ground,  yet  catching  the 
whispering  of  the  most  delicious  of  summer  breezes,  and  the  far- 
off  touch  of  the  gladdest  of  sunbeams,  and  the  faint  scent  of 
the  sweetest  of  flowers,  may  have  meant  for  the  wee  dreamy 
sensitive  creature  ?  " 

The  following  dialogue  between  C.  and  his  mother  at  the 
beginning  of  the  fourth  month  may  further  illustrate  his  feeling 
about  this  subject. 

C.  "  Why  must  people  die,  mamma  ?  " 

M.  "  They  get  worn  out,  and  so  can't  live  always,  just  as 
the  flowers  and  leaves  fade  and  die." 

C.  "  Well,  but  why  can't  they  come  to  life  again  just  like 
the  flowers  ?  " 

M.  "  The  same  flowers  don't  come  to  life  again,  dear." 

C.  "  Well,  the  little  seed  out  of  the  flower  drops  into  the 
earth  and  springs  up  again  into  a  flower.  Why  can't  people 
do  like  that?  " 

M.  "  Most  people  get  very  tired  and  want  to  sleep  for 
ever." 

C.  "  Oh  !  I  shan't  want  to  sleep  for  ever,  and  when  I  am 
buried  I  shall  try  to  wake  up  again, ;  and  there  won't  be  any 
earth  on  my  eyes,  will  there,  mamma  ?  " 

The  difficulty  of  coupling  the  fact  of  burial  with  after- 
existence  in  heaven  then  began  to  trouble  him.  One  day 
(middle  of  eighth  month)  he  and  his  mother  were  passing  a 
churchyard.  He  looked  intently  at  the  gravestones  and  asked  : 
"  Mamma,  it's  only  the  naughty  people  who  are  buried,  isn't 
it  ?  "  Being  asked  why  he  thought  so  he  continued  :  "  Because 
auntie  said  all  the  good  people  went  to  heaven  ".  On  his 
mother  telling  him  that  all  people  are  buried  he  said  :  "  Oh, 
then  heaven  must  be  under  the  ground,  or  they  couldn't  get 
there".  Another  way  by  which  he  tried  to  surmount  the  difficulty 
was  by  supposing  that  God  would  have  to  come  up  through 
the  ground  to  take  us  to  heaven.  He  clung  tenaciously  to  the 
idea  of  heaven  as  an  escape  from  the  horror  of  death.  That 
the  hope  of  heaven  was  the  core  of  his  religious  belief  is  seen 


480  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

in  the  following  little  talk  between  him  and  his  mother  and 
sister  one  evening  at  the  end  of  the  first  month. 

C.   "  Does  God  ever  die  ?  " 

E.  (the  sister).  "  No,  dear,  and  when  we  die  God  will  take 
us  to  live  with  him  in  heaven." 

C.  (to  mother).  "  Will  he,  mamma  ?  " 

M.  "  I  hope  so,  dear." 

C.  "  Well,  what  is  God  good  for  if  he  won't  take  us  to 
heaven  when  we  die  ?  "  ' 

Sixth    Year. 

The  sixth  year,  the  last  with  which  the  diary  attempts 
to  deal,  is  very  meagrely  represented.  The  observation  was 
plainly  becoming  intermittent  and  lax.  I  have,  however, 
thought  it  worth  while  to  complete  this  sketch  of  a  child's 
mental  development  by  a  reference  to  this  fragmentary 
chapter. 

The  child  continued  to  be  observant  of  the  forms  of  things. 
He  began  to  attend  the  Kindergarten  at  the  beginning  of  this 
year,  and  this  probably  served  to  develop  his  visual  observa- 
tion. We  have,  however,  no  very  striking  illustrations  of  his 
perceptual  powers.  It  might  interest  the  naturalist  to  know 
that  he  compared  the  head  of  Mr.  Darwin,  which  he  saw  in  a 
photograph,  to  that  of  an  elephant,  and  being  asked  why  he 
thought  them  like  one  another,  answered  :  "  Because  it  is  so 
far  from  the  top  of  the  head  to  the  ear  ".  Perhaps  admirers  of 
our  great  naturalist  may  be  ready  to  pardon  the  likening  of  their 
hero's  head  to  that  of  one  of  the  most  intelligent  of  the  large 
animal  family  which  he  showed  to  be  our  kinsfolk. 

Another  remark  of  his  at  about  the  same  date  seems  to 
show  that  he  still  entertained  a  particularly  gross  form  of  the 
animistic  conception  that  things  are  double,  and  that  there  is  a 
second  filmy  body  within  the  solid  tangible  one.  He  was  look- 
ing at  the  pictures  in  Darwin's  Descent  of  Man,  and  came 
on  some  drawings  of  the  human  embryo.  His  mother  asked 
him  what  they  looked  like,  and  he  replied  :  "  Why,  like  the 

1  On  children's  attempts  to  understand  about  being  buried  and 
going  to  heaven,  see  above,  p.  120  ff. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  481 

inside  of  persons  of  course  ' .  Asked  to  explain  this  he  pointed 
to  the  head,  the  eye,  the  stomach,  and  so  forth. 

He  spontaneously  began  to  talk  (middle  of  eighth  month) 
about  opposition  of  colours.  He  was  looking  at  his  coloured 
soldiers  and  talking  to  himself  in  this  wise  :  "  Which  colour 
is  most  opposite  colour  to  blue  ?  "  He  said  that  red  was  its 
opposite,  not  yellow  as  suggested  by  his  father,  in  which 
opinion  he  probably  has  a  good  many  older  people  on  his  side. 
He  also  observed  to  his  father  at  the  same  date  :  "  I  tell  you, 
papa,  what  two  colours  are  very  like  one  another,  blue  and 
green  ".  The  father  remarks,  however,  that  he  was  now 
mixing  pigments  and  using  them,  and  that  the  knowledge  so 
gained  probably  made  him  bring  blue  and  green  nearer  to  one 
another  than  he  used  to  do. 

An  opportunity  of  testing  his  memory  occurred  at  the 
beginning  of  the  sixth  month.  He  met  a  gentleman  who  had 
been  kind  to  him  during  that  memorable  visit  to  the  sea-side 

village  D just  three  and  a  half  years  before,  and  whom  he 

had  not  seen  since.  His  father  asked  the  child  whether  he 
knew  Mr.  S.  He  looked  at  him  steadily,  and  answered  yes. 
Asked  where  he  had  seen  him,  he  answered :  "  Down  at 

- ".  He  had  forgotten  the  name  of  the  place.  On  his 
father  further  asking  him  what  he  remembered  about  him  he 
said  :  "  He  made  me  boats  and  sailed  them  in  a  pool  ".  This 
was  quite  correct.  So  far  as  the  father  can  say  the  fact  had 
not  been  spoken  of  to  him  since  the  time.  If  this  is  so,  it 
seems  worth  recording  that  a  child  of  five  and  a  half  should 
recall  such  distinct  impressions  of  what  had  occurred  when  he 
was  only  just  two. 

Fancy,  the  old  frisky,  wonder-working  fancy,  was  now 
getting  less  active.  At  least,  we  meet  this  year  with  none  of 
the  pretty  fairy-myths  of  earlier  years.  So  far  as  the  journal 
tells  us,  it  was  only  in  sleep  that  C.  entered  the  delightful 
region  of  wonderland.  Here  is  a  quaint  dream  of  his  (end  of 
fifth  month).  It  was  Christmas  time,  and  he  had  been  seeing 
a  huge  prize-ox,  a  shaggy  Highland  fellow  with  big  head  and 
curled  horns.  He  had  taken  a  violent  fancy  to  it  and  wanted 
his  father  to  draw  it  for  him.  A  morning  or  two  afterwards  he 

31 


482  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

told  his  father  that  he  had  had  a  funny  dream.  Both  his  father 
and  his  mother  were  turned  into  oxen,  and  it  was  a  "very  nice 
dream  ". 

For  the  rest,  the  brain  of  our  little  Kindergartner  was  being 
engrossed  with  the  business  of  getting  knowledge,  and,  as  a 
result  of  this  fancy,  was  being  taken  in  hand  by  sober  under- 
standing and  drilled  to  the  useful  and  necessary  task  of 
discovering  truth. 

We  get  one  or  two  pretty  glimpses  of  the  boy  trundling 
his  hoop  beside  his  father  in  a  late  evening  walk  and  now  and 
again  stopping  to  ask  questions.  Here  is  one  (end  of  third 
month) :  They  were  walking  home  together  across  the  sands 
at  Hunstanton  at  the  rosy  sun-set  hour.  C.  was  much  im- 
pressed and  began  asking  his  father  how  far  off  the  sun  was. 
On  finding  out  that  the  clouds  were  not  a  hard  substance  but 
could  be  passed  through,  he  wanted  to  know  what  was  on  the 
other  side.  "  Is  it  another  world,  papa,  like  this  ?  " 

Shortly  after  this  date  he  was  talking  about  the  size  of  the  sun, 
when  he  remarked:  "  I  s'pose  the  sun's  big  enough  to  put  on  the 
world  and  make  see-saw  ".  He  seemed  to  think  of  the  sun  as  a 
disc,  and  imagined  that  it  might  be  balanced  on  the  earth-globe. 

What  with  home  instruction  and  the  '  lessons '  at  the 
Kindergarten  his  little  brain  was  being  confronted  with  quite  a 
multitude  of  new  problems.  It  was  interesting,  remarks  the 
father,  to  note  how  he  would  try  to  piece  together  the  various 
scraps  of  knowledge  he  thus  gathered.  For  instance,  we  find 
him  in  the  ninth  month  trying  hard  to  make  something  out  of 
the  motley  presentations  of  the  '  world '  which  he  had  got  from 
classical  myths  as  known  through  the  Tanglewood  Tales  and 
from  his  elementary  geography  lessons.  He  asked  whether 
Atlas  could  stand  in  the  middle  of  the  sea  and  not  be  drowned. 
On  his  father's  trying  to  evade  this  awkward  question,  the  boy 
inquired  whether  the  sea  came  half  way  up  the  world.  Asked 
to  explain  what  he  meant,  he  continued  :  "  You  know  the  shore 
gets  lower  and  lower  or  else  the  sea  would  not  go  out ;  and 
out  in  the  middle  it  goes  down  very  deep.  Now,  where  the 
sea  comes  in,  is  that  half  way  up  the  world  ?  "  One  would  like 
to  know  how  the  father  met  this  dark  inquiry. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  483 

He  would  sometimes  apply  his  newly-gained  knowledge  in 
an  odd  fashion.  One  day  (middle  of  ninth  month),  he  observed 
that  his  porridge  was  hottest  in  the  middle,  and  remarked  : 
"  That's  just  like  the  earth.  It's  hottest  in  the  middle.  There's 
real  fire  there."  This  smacks  just  a  little  perhaps  of  pedantry, 
and  the  child,  on  entering  the  new  world  of  school-lore,  is,  we 
know,  apt  to  display  the  pride  of  learning.  Yet  we  must  be- 
ware, writes  the  ever-apologetic  father,  of  judging  the  child's 
ways  too  rigorously  by  our  grown-up  standards. 

The  progress  in  the  more  abstract  kind  of  thinking  and  in 
the  correlative  use  of  abstract  language  was  very  noticeable  at 
this  stage.  An  odd  example  of  an  original  way  of  expressing 
a  newly  attained  relation  of  thought  occurred  towards  the  end 
of  the  third  month.  C.  was  at  this  time  much  occupied  with 
the  subject  of  the  bearing-rein,  the  cruelty  of  which  he  had  learnt 
from  a  favourite  story,  the  autobiography  of  a  horse,  called 
Black  Beauty.  One  day  when  walking  out,  and,  as  was  his 
wont,  vigilantly  observant  of  all  passing  horses,  he  said : 
"That  horse  has  bearing-rein  at  all,"  by  which  he  seems  to 
have  meant  that  the  horse  had  it  somewhere  or  wore  it  some- 
times. The  use  of  expressions  like  these,  which  at  once  made 
his  statements  more  cautious  and  showed  a  better  grasp  of  the 
full  sweep  of  a  proposition,  was  very  characteristic  at  this 
period. 

Even  now,  however,  he  found  himself  sometimes  compelled  to 
eke  out  his  slender  vocabulary  by  concrete  and  pictorial  descrip- 
tions of  the  abstract.  Thus  one  day  (end  of  eighth  month)  he 
happened  to  overhear  his  father  say  that  he  should  oppose  a  propo- 
sal of  a  member  of  the  Library  Committee  to  which  he  belonged. 
C.,  boy-like,  interested  in  the  prospect  of  a  tussle,  asked  :  "Who 
is  the  greatest  man,  you  or  Mr.  —  —  ?  "  Asked  by  his  father, 
who  imagined  that  the  child  was  thinking  of  a  physical  con- 
test with  the  honourable  gentleman,  "  Do  you  mean  taller  ?  " 
he  answered  :  "  No.  Who  is  most  like  a  king  ?  "  In  this 
wise,  observes  the  chronicler,  did  he  try  to  express  his  new 
idea  of  authority  or  influence  over  others. 

While  he  thus  pushed  his  way  into  the  tangle  of  abstract 
ideas,  he  found  himself  now  and  again  pulled  up  by  a  thorny 


484  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

obstacle.  Some  of  us  can  remember  how  when  young  we  had 
much  trouble  in  learning  to  recognise  the  difference  between  the 
right  and  the  left  hand.  C.  experienced  the  same  difficulty.  One 
evening  (towards  the  end  of  the  eleventh  month)  after  being  put 
to  bed  he  complained  of  a  sore  spot  on  his  foot.  Being  asked 
on  which  foot,  the  right  or  the  left,  he  said  :  "  I  can't  tell  when 
in  bed.  I  can't  say  when  my  clothes  are  off.  I  know  my 
right  side  by  my  pockets."  It  would  seem  as  if  the  differences 
in  the  muscular  and  other  sensations  by  help  of  which  we  come 
to  distinguish  the  one  side  of  the  body  from  the  other  are  too 
slight  to  be  readily  recognised,  and  that  a  clear  intuition  of  this 
simple  and  fundamental  relation  of  position  is  the  work  of  a 
prolonged  experience.1 

By  the  end  of  the  fourth  month — a  month  after  joining  the 
Kindergarten — he  was  able  to  count  up  to  a  century.  His 
interest  in  counting,  which  was  particularly  lively  just  now,  is 
illustrated  in  the  fact  that  in  the  fifth  month,  after  showing 
himself  very  curious  about  the  word  '  fortnight,'  saying  again 
and  again  that  it  was  a  funny  word,  and  asking  what  it  meant,, 
he  put  the  question  :  "  Does  it  mean  fourteen  nights  ?  " 

About  the  same  date  he  proffered  a  definition  of  one  of  the 
most  difficult  of  subjects.  His  mother  had  been  trying  to  ex- 
plain the  difference  between  poetry  and  prose  by  saying  that 
the  former  describes  beautiful  things,  when  he  suddenly  in- 
terrupted her,  exclaiming  :  "  Oh  yes,  I  know,  it's  language 
with  ornaments  ".  But  here  the  diary  has,  it  must  be  confessed,, 
the  look  of  wishing  to  display  the  boy's  accomplishments,  a 
fault  from  which,  on  the  whole,  it  is  creditably  free. 

As  might  be  expected,  the  boy's  reasoning  was  now  much 
sounder,  that  is  to  say,  more  like  our  own.  Yet  now  and  again 

1  According  to  Professor  Baldwin's  observations  the  infant  shows- 
a  decided  right-handedness,  that  is,  a  disposition  to  reach  out  with 
the  right  hand  rather  than  with  the  left,  by  the  seventh  or  eighth 
month  (quoted  by  Tracy,  The  Psychology  of  Childhood,  p.  55).  But  of 
course  this  is  a  long  way  from  a  definite  intuition  and  idea  of  the 
right  and  the  left  hand.  Mr.  E.  Kratz  finds  that  more  than  one- 
fourth  of  children  of  five  coming  to  a  primary  school  cannot  distin- 
guish the  right  hand  from  the  left. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  485 

the  old  easy  fashion  of  induction  would  crop  up.  Thus  one 
•day  (towards  end  of  ninth  month)  he  was  puzzled  by  the  fact 
that  boys  of  the  same  age  might  be  of  unequal  size.  This 
brought  him  to  the  old  subject  of  growth,  and  he  suggested 
quite  seriously  that  the  taller  boys  had  had  more  sun.  On 
his  father  saying  :  '  The  sun  makes  plants  grow,'  he  added  : 
"  And  people  too  ". 

His  questionings  took  about  this  time  the  direction  of 
origins  or  beginnings.  As  with  other  children,  God  did  not 
appear  to  be  the  starting-point  in  the  evolution  of  things, 
and  he  once  asked  quite  seriously  (end  of  sixth  month) : 
"  What  was  God  like  in  his  younger  days  ?  "  With  a  like  im- 
pulse to  go  back  to  absolute  beginnings  he  inquired  about  the 
same  date,  after  learning  that  chicken-pox  was  only  caught 
from  other  animals  :  "  What  was  the  person  or  thing  that  first 
had  chicken-pox  ?  "  A  little  later  (beginning  of  ninth  month) 
he  and  a  boy  companion  of  nearly  the  same  age  were  talking 
about  the  beginnings  of  human  life.  C.  said  :  "  I  can't  make 
out  how  the  first  man  in  the  world  was  able  to  speak.  A  word, 
you  know,  has  a  sound,  and  how  did  he  find  out  what  sound 
to  make  ?  "  His  friend  then  said  that  his  puzzle  was  how  the 
first  babies  were  nursed.  This  child  seems  to  have  set  out 
with  the  supposition  that  the  history  of  our  race  began  with 
the  arrival  of  babies. 

Very  little  is  told  us  in  this  unfinished  chapter  of  the  child's 
emotional  and  moral  development.  As  might  be  expected  from 
the  increase  of  intellectual  activity  the  movements  expressive 
-of  the  feelings  of  strain  and  perplexity  which  accompany 
thought  grew  more  distinct.  In  particular  it  was  noticeable  at 
this  time  that  during  the  fits  of  thought  the  child's  face  would 
take  on  a  quaint  old-fashioned  look,  the  eye-brows  being 
puckered  up  and  the  eye-lids  twitching. 

He  continued  very  sensitive  about  the  cruelties  of  the  world, 
more  especially  towards  animals.  One  day  (at  the  end  of  the 
fifth  month)  his  mother  had  been  reading  to  him  his  favourite, 
Black  Beauty,  in  which  a  war-horse  describes  to  the  equine 
author  the  horrors  of  war.  C.  was  deeply  affected  by  the 
picture,  and  at  length  exclaimed  with  much  emphasis,  "  Oh, 


486  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

ma  !  why  do  they  do  such  things  ?  It's  a  beastly,  beastly 
world,"  at  the  same  time  bursting  into  tears  and  hiding  his  face 
in  his  mother's  lap.  "  So  hard,"  writes  the  father,  "  did  the 
boy  still  find  it,  notwithstanding  his  increased  knowledge,  to 
accept  this  human  world  as  a  right  and  just  one." 

The  religious  thought  and  sentiment  remained  thoroughly 
childish.  He  was  still  puzzled  about  the  relations  of  heaven 
and  the  grave.  One  day  (end  of  sixth  month)  his  father 
observed,  looking  at  the  Christmas  pudding  on  the  table 
wreathed  with  violet  flame :  "  Oh,  how  I  should  like  to  be 
burned  after  death  instead  of  being  buried ".  On  this  C. 
looking  alarmed  said  :  "7  won't  be  burned.  I  shouldn't  go  to 
heaven  then."  On  his  father  remarking :  "  'Tisn't  your  body 
that  goes  to  heaven,"  he  continued:  "But  my  head  does". 
Here,  writes  the  father,  we  seem  to  perceive  a  transition  from 
the  old  gross  materialism  of  last  year  to  a  more  refined  form. 
C.  was  now,  it  may  be  presumed,  localising  the  soul  in  the 
head,  and  clinging  to  the  idea  that  at  least  that  limited  portion 
of  our  frame  might  manage  to  get  away  from  the  dark  grave  ta 
the  bright  celestial  regions.  It  may  be  too,  he  adds,  that  this 
fancy  was  aided  by  seeing  pictures  of  detached  cherub  heads.1 

A  month  or  two  later  (beginning  of  ninth  month)  he  began 
to  attack  the  difficult  problem  of  Divine  fore-knowledge  and 
free-will.  His  mother  had  been  remonstrating  with  him  about 
his  naughty  ways.  He  grew  very  miserable  and  said  :  "I 
can't  make  out  how  it  is  God  doesn't  make  us  good.  I  pray  to 
him  to  make  me  good."  To  this  his  mother  replied  that  he 
must  help  himself  to  be  good.  This  only  drew  from  C.  the 
following  protest :  "  Then  what's  the  use  of  having  God  if 
we  have  to  help  ourselves  ".  "  Even  now,"  writes  the  father, 
"  it  looks  as  if  God  and  heaven  were  for  him  institutions,  the 
raison  d'etre  of  which  was  their  serviceableness  to  man." 

He  brought  to  the  consideration  of  prayer  a  childish  sense 
of  propriety  which  sometimes  wore  a  quaint  aspect.  One  day 
(end  of  third  month)  on  his  return  from  the  Kindergarten  he 
asked  his  mother  :  "  Does  God  teach  us  ?  "  and  when  bidden  ex- 
plain his  question  continued :  "  Because  they  said  that  at  school" 

1  Compare  above,  p.  123. 


EXTRACTS   FROM   A   FATHER'S   DIARY.  487 

("  Teach  us  to  be  good  ").  He  then  added  :  "  But  anyhow 
that  isn't  a  proper  way  to  speak  to  God  ".  His  notion  of  what 
was  the  proper  way  was  illustrated  in  his  own  practice.  One 
evening  (end  of  sixth  month)  after  his  bath  he  was  kneeling 
with  his  head  on  his  mother's  lap  so  that  she  might  dry  his 
hair.  He  began  to  pray  half  audibly  in  this  wise  :  "  Please, 
God,  let  me  find  out  before  my  birthday,  but  at  least  on  my 
birthday.  ...  So  now  good-bye  !  "  This  ending,  obviously 
borrowed  from  his  sister's  letters,  was  varied  on  another 
occasion  in  this  way  :  "  With  my  love,  good-bye".1 

It  seems  strange  that  the  diary  should  break  off  at  a  time 
when  there  was  so  much  of  the  quaint  and  pretty  child-traits 
left  to  be  observed.  No  explanation  of  the  abrupt  termination  is 
offered,  and  I  am  only  able  to  conjecture  that  the  father  was  at  this 
time  pressed  with  other  work,  and  that  when  he  again  found  the 
needed  leisure  he  discovered  to  his  chagrin  that  time,  aided  by  the 
school-drill,  was  already  doing  its  work.  We  know  that  it  is 
about  this  time  that  the  artist,  Nature,  is  wont  to  rub  out  the 
characteristic  infantile  lines  in  her  first  crude  sketch  of  a  human 
mind,  and  to  elaborate  a  fuller  and  maturer  picture.  And 
while  the  onlooking  parent  may  rejoice  in  the  unfolding  of  the 
higher  human  lineaments,  he  cannot  altogether  suppress  a 
pang  at  the  disappearance  of  what  was  so  delightfully  fresh 
and  lovely. 

I  will  close  these  extracts,  following  the  father's  own  fashion, 
with  a  word  of  apology.  C.'s  doings  and  sayings  have  seemed 
to  me  worth  recording,  not  because  their  author  was  in  any 
sense  a  remarkable  child,  but  solely  because  he  was  a  true 
child.  In  spite  of  his  habitual  association  with  grown-up 
people  he  retained  with  childish  independence  his  own  ways 
of  looking  at  things.  No  doubt  something  of  the  intellectual 
fop,  of  the  assertive  prig,  peeps  out  now  and  again.  Yet 
if  we  consider  how  much  attention  was  given  to  his  utter- 
ances, this  is  not  surprising.  For  the  greater  part  the  sayings 
appear  to  me  the  direct  naive  utterance  of  genuine  childish 
conviction.  And  it  is  possible  that  the  inevitable  impulse  of 
the  parent  to  show  off  his  child  has  done  C.  injustice  by 

1  Compare  above,  p.  283. 


488  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

making  too  much,  especially  in  the  last  chapter  of  the  diary,  of 
what  looks  smart.  Heaven  grant  that  our  observations  of  the 
little  ones  may  never  destroy  the  delightful  simplicity  and 
unconsciousness  of  their  ways,  and  turn  them  into  disagreeable 
little  performers,  all  conscious  of  their  role,  and  greedy  of  ad- 
miration. 


489 


XII. 

GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD. 

The  First   Years. 

MUCH  has  been  written  about  George  Sand,  but  singularly 
little  about  her  childhood.  Yet  she  herself,  when  she  set  to 
work,  between  forty  and  fifty,  to  write  the  Histoire  de  ma  Vie, 
thought  it  worth  while  to  fill  the  best  part  of  two  volumes  of 
that  work  with  early  reminiscences ;  and  herein  surely  she 
judged  wisely.  Good  descriptions  of  childish  experience  are  rare 
enough.  George  Sand  gives  us  a  singularly  full  story  of  child- 
hood ;  and,  allowing  for  the  fact  of  its  author  being  a  novelist, 
one  may  say  that  this  story  reads  on  the  whole  like  a  record  of 
memory.  That  a  narrative  at  once  so  charming  and  so  pathetic 
should  have  been  neglected,  by  English  writers  at  least,  can 
only  be  set  down  to  the  circumstance  that  it  is  not  clearly 
marked  off  from  the  tediously  full  account  of  ancestors  which 
precedes  it.1 

The  early  reminiscences  of  a  great  man  or  woman  have  a 
special  interest.  Schopenhauer  has  ingeniously  traced  out  the 
essential  similarity  of  the  man  of  genius  and  the  child.  What- 
ever the  value  of  this  analogy,  it  is  certain  that  the  gifted  child 
seems  not  less  but  more  of  a  child  because  of  his  gifts.  This 
is  emphatically  true  of  the  little  lady  with  whom  we  are  now 
concerned,  and  of  whom,  since  we  are  interested  in  her  on  her 
own  account  and  not  merely  as  the  precursor  of  the  great 
novelist,  we  shall  speak  by  her  rightful  name,  Aurore  Dupin. 

1 A  selection  of  scenes  from  the  story,  with  notes,  has  been  pre- 
pared for  young  English  students  by  M.  Eugene  Joel,  under  the  title, 
L'Enfatice  de  George  Sand  (Rivingtons). 


49O  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

The  reader  need  not  be  told  that  the  child  who  was  to  be- 
come the  representative  among  modern  women  of  the  daring 
irregularities  of  genius  was  an  uncommon  child.  She  would 
certainly  have  been  set  down  as  strange  and  as  deficient  in 
childish  traits  by  a  commonplace  observer.  Yet  close  inspec- 
tion shows  that  the  untamed  and  untamable  '  oddities  '  were, 
after  all,  only  certain  common  childish  impulses  and  tendencies 
exalted,  or,  if  the  reader  prefers,  exaggerated.  Herein  lies  the 
chief  value  of  the  story.  To  this  it  may  be  added  that  this 
exaggeration  of  childish  sensibility  was  set  in  a  milieu  admir- 
ably fitted  to  stir  and  strain  it  to  the  utmost.  It  was  a  motley 
turbulent  world  into  which  little  Aurore  was  unceremoniously 
pitched,  and  makes  the  chronicle  of  her  experience  a  thrilling 
romance.  And  all  this  experience,  it  may  be  said  finally,  is 
set  down  with  the  untroubled  regard  and  the  patient  hand  of 
one  of  the  old  chroniclers.  The  forty  years  had  left  the  memory 
tenacious  and  clear  to  a  remarkable  degree — in  this  respect  the 
story  will  bear  comparison  with  the  childish  recallings  of 
Goethe  and  the  other  famous  self-historians  ;  at  the  same  time 
these  years  had  brought  the  woman's  power  of  quiet  retro- 
spect and  the  artist's  habit  of  calm  complacent  envisagement. 
Herein  lies  a  further  element  of  value.  The  writer  feels  her 
identity  with  the  subject  of  her  memoir  :  she  lives  over  again 
the  passion-storms  and  ennuis,  the  reveries  and  hoydenish 
freaks  of  little  Aurore  ;  yet  she  can  detach  herself  from  her 
heroine  too,  and  discuss  her  and  her  surroundings  with  perfect 
artistic  aloofness. 

Aurore — or,  to  give  her  her  full  appellation,  Amandine 
Lucile  Aurore  Dupin — was  born  in  1804.  Her  father,  a  dis- 
tinguished officer  of  the  Empire,  was  grandson  of  Maurice  de 
Saxe,  natural  son  of  Augustus  II.,  King  of  Poland.  Her 
mother  was  a  daughter  of  a  Parisian  bird-seller,  and  a  true 
child  of  the  people.  The  student  of  heredity  may,  perhaps, 
find  in  this  commingling  of  noble  and  humble  blood  a  key  to 
much  of  the  wild  and  bizarre  in  the  child  as  well  as  in  the 
later  woman.  However  this  may  be,  it  is  certain  that  the 
disparate  alliance  gave  the  sombre  and  almost  tragic  hue  to 
the  child's  destiny.  Through  the  precious  years  that  should 


GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD.  491 

be  given  over  to  happy  play  and  dreams,  she  was  to  hear  the 
harsh  and  dismal  contention  of  classes,  and  hear  it,  too,  in  the 
shape  of  a  bawling  strife  for  the  possession  of  herself. 

The  first  home  was  a  humble  lodging  in  Paris.  The  father 
was  away.  The  mother,  disdained  by  the  father's  family,  had 
to  be  hard  at  work,  and  the  baby  had  its  irregular  career  fore- 
shadowed by  being  often  handed  over  to  a  male  nurse,  one  Pierret, 
an  ugly  and  quarrelsome  though  really  good-natured  creature, 
whom  an  accident  suddenly  made  a  devoted  friend  of  the  small 
family,  faithfully  dividing  his  time  between  the  estaminet  and 
the  Dupin  menage. 

Beyond  a  recollection  of  an  accident,  a  fall  against  the 
corner  of  the  chimney-piece,  which  shock,  she  tells  us,  '  opened 
my  mind  to  the  sense  of  life,'  the  first  three  years  yield  no  re- 
miniscences. From  that  date  onwards,  however,  her  memory 
moves  without  a  hitch,  and  gives  us  a  series  of  delightful 
vignette-like  pictures  of  child-life. 

Her  mother  had  a  fresh,  sweet  voice,  and  the  first  song  she 
sang  to  Aurore  was  the  nursery  rhyme  : — 

Aliens  dans  la  grange 
Voir  la  poule  blanche 
Qui  pond  un  bel  ceuf  d'argent 
Pour  ce  cher  petit  enfant. 

I  was  vividly  impressed  [she  writes]  with  that  white  hen  and  that 
silver  egg  which  was  promised  me  every  evening,  and  for  which  I 
never  thought  of  asking  the  next  morning.  The  promise  returned 
always,  and  the  naive  hope  returned  with  it. 

The  legend  of  little  Father  Christmas,  a  good  old  man  with 
a  white  beard,  who  came  down  the  chimney  exactly  at  midnight 
and  placed  a  simple  present,  a  red  apple  or  an  orange,  in  her 
little  shoe,  excited  the  infantile  imagination  to  unusual  activity. 

Midnight,  that  fantastic  hour  which  children  know  not,  and  which 
we  point  out  to  them  as  the  unattainable  limit  of  their  wakefulness ! 
What  incredible  efforts  I  made  not  to  fall  asleep  before  the  appearance 
of  the  little  old  man.  I  had  at  once  a  great  desire  and  a  great  fear 
to  see  him  ;  but  I  could  never  keep  awake. 

The  love  of  sound,  so  strong  in  children,  found  an  outlet  in 


492  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

playing  with  some  brass  wirework  on  the  doors  of  an  alcove 
near  her  bed. 

My  special  amusement  before  going  to  sleep  was  to  run  my  fingers 
over  the  brass  network.  The  little  sounds  that  I  drew  thence  seemed 
to  me  a  heavenly  music,  and  I  used  to  hear  my  mother  say,  "  There's 
Aurore  playing  the  wirework  ". 

Her  vivid  recollection  enables  her  to  describe  with  a  sure 
touch  the  oddly  mixed  and  capriciously  changeful  feeling  of 
children  towards  their  dolls  and  other  simulacra  of  living  creatures. 
She  somehow  had  presented  to  her  a  superb  Punch,  brilliant 
with  gold  and  scarlet,  of  whom  she  was  greatly  afraid  at 
first,  on  account  of  her  doll.  Before  going  to  bed  she  securely 
shut  up  this  last  in  a  cupboard,  and  laid  the  brilliant  monster 
on  his  back  on  the  stove  ;  but  her  anxieties  were  not  yet  over. 

I  fell  asleep  very  much  preoccupied  with  the  manner  of  existence 
of  this  wicked  being  who  was  always  laughing,  and  could  pursue  me 
with  his  eyes  into  all  the  corners  of  the  room.  In  the  night  I  had 
a  frightful  dream  :  Punch  had  got  up,  his  hump  had  caught  on  fire 
on  the  stove,  and  he  ran  about  in  all  directions,  chasing  now  me, 
now  my  doll,  which  fled  distractedly.  Just  as  he  was  overtaking 
us  with  long  jets  of  flame,  I  awoke  my  mother  with  my  cries. 

Her  childish  way  of  looking  at  dolls  is  thus  described  in 
another  place  : — 

I  do  not  remember  to  have  ever  believed  that  my  doll  was  an 
animated  being ;  nevertheless,  I  have  felt  for  some  of  my  dolls  a  real 
maternal  affection.  .  .  .  Children  are  between  the  real  and  the  im- 
possible. They  need  to  care  for,  to  scold,  to  caress,  and  to  break 
this  fetish  of  a  child  or  animal  that  is  given  them  for  a  plaything, 
and  with  which  they  are  wrongly  accused  of  growing  disgusted  too 
quickly.  It  is  quite  natural,  on  the  contrary,  that  they  should  grow 
disgusted  with  them.  In  breaking  them  they  protest  against  the 
lie. 

She  only  broke  those,  she  adds,  that  could  not  stand  the 
test  of  being  undressed,  or  that  proclaimed  their  unfleshly 
substance  by  falling  and  breaking  their  noses.  The  fluctua- 
tions of  childish  feeling  in  this  matter,  and  the  triumph  of 
faith  over  doubt  in  the  case  of  a  real  favourite,  are  prettily 
illustrated  in  a  later  story  of  how  she  parted  from  her  doll 
when  she  was  going  from  home  on  a  long  journey. 


GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD.  493 

At  the  moment  of  setting  out  I  ran  to  give  it  a  last  look,  and 
when  Pierret  promised  to  come  and  make  it  take  soup  every  morning, 
I  began  to  fall  into  a  state  of  doubt,  which  children  are  wont  to  feel 
respecting  the  reality  of  these  creatures,  a  state  truly  singular,  in 
which  nascent  reason  on  one  side  and  the  need  of  illusion  on  the 
other  combat  in  their  heart  greedy  of  maternal  love.  I  took  the  two 
hands  of  my  doll  and  joined  them  over  its  breast.  Pierret  remarked 
that  this  was  the  attitude  of  a  dead  person.  Thereupon  I  raised 
the  hands,  still  joined,  above  the  head,  in  the  attitude  of  despair  or 
of  invocation.  With  this  I  associated  a  superstitious  idea,  thinking 
that  it  was  an  appeal  to  the  good  fairy,  and  that  the  doll  would  be 
protected,  remaining  in  this  position  all  the  time  of  my  absence. J 

The  gift  of  vivid  imagination  is  probably  quite  as  much  a 
torment  as  a  joy  to  a  child,  as  the  story  of  Punch  suggests. 
Aurore's  finely  strung  nervous  organisation  exposed  her  to  a 
preternatural  intensity  of  fear,  and  made  any  clumsy  attempt 
to  '  frighten '  by  suggestion  of  '  black  hole,'  or  other  childish 
horror,  more  than  ordinarily  cruel.  One  day  she  had  been 
with  her  mother  and  Pierret  on  a  visit  to  her  aunt.  On  re- 
turning towards  the  evening  she  was  lazy  and  wanted  the 
amiable  Pierret  to  carry  her.  So  to  spur  her  on  her  mother 
threatened  in  fun  to  leave  her  alone  if  she  did  not  come  on. 
The  child  knew  it  was  not  meant,  and  daringly  stopped  while 
the  others  made  a  feint  of  moving  on.  It  happened  that  a 
little  old  woman  was  just  then  lighting  a  lamp  hard  by,  and, 
having  overheard  the  talk,  turned  to  the  child  and  said  in  a 
broken  voice,  '  Beware  of  me ;  it  is  I  who  take  up  the  wicked 
little  girls,  and  I  shut  them  in  my  lamp  all  the  night'. 

It  seemed  as  if  the  devil  had  whispered  to  this  good  woman  the 
idea  that  would  most  terrify  me.  I  do  not  remember  ever  expeiienc- 
ing  such  a  terror  as  she  caused  me.  The  lamp,  with  its  glittering 
reflector,  instantly  took  on  fantastic  proportions,  and  I  saw  myself 
already  shut  in  this  crystal  prison  consumed  by  the  flame  which  the 

1  What  George  Sand  here  writes  about  the  intrusion  of  doubt  and 
disgust  into  the  child's  feeling  for  the  doll  does  not,  I  think,  con- 
tradict what  was  said  above  in  chapter  ii.  on  the  intensity  and 
persistence  of  his  faith.  In  truth  these  are  illustrated  in  the  very 
resistance  to  the  occasional  attack  of  the  child's  nascent  reason,  just 
as  they  are  illustrated  in  the  resistance  to  others'  sceptical  assaults. 


494  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

Punch  in  petticoats  made  to  burst  forth  at  her  pleasure.  I  ran 
towards  my  mother  uttering  piercing  cries.  I  heard  the  old  woman 
laugh,  and  the  grating  sound  of  the  lamp  as  she  remounted  gave  me 
a  nervous  shiver. 

At  bottom  Aurora's  nature  was  a  happy  one,  and  if  it 
encountered  in  the  real  world  the  terrors  of  childhood,  it  found 
in  the  ideal  world  of  fiction  its  supreme  delights.  Before  she 
learned  to  read  (about  four)  she  had  managed  to  stock  her 
small  brain  with  an  odd  jumble  of  supernatural  imagery,  the 
outcome  of  fairy  stories  recited  to  her,  and  of  picture-books 
setting  forth  incidents  from  classical  mythology  and  the  lives 
of  the  saints  ;  and  she  soon  began  to  make  artistic  use  of  this 
motley  material.  Her  mother,  she  tells  us,  used  to  shut  her 
within  four  straw  chairs  in  order  to  keep  her  from  playing  with  the 
fire.  She  would  then  amuse  herself  by  pulling  out  the  straws 
with  her  hands  (she  always  felt  the  need  of  occupying  her 
hands)  and  composing  in  a  loud  voice  interminable  stories. 
They  were  of  course  modelled  on  the  familiar  fairy-tale 
pattern.  The  principal  characters  were  a  good  fairy,  a  good 
prince,  and  a  beautiful  princess.  There  were  but  few  wicked 
beings,  and  never  great  misfortunes.  '  All  arranged  itself 
under  the  influence  of  a  thought,  smiling  and  optimistic  as 
childhood.'  These  stories,  carried  on  day  after  day,  were  the 
subject  of  amusing  comment.  'Well,  Aurore,'  the  aunt  used 
to  ask,  '  hasn't  your  prince  got  out  of  the  forest  yet  ?  ' 

To  Aurore's  ardent  imagination,  play,  as  the  story  of  the 
doll  suggests,  was  more  than  the  half-hearted  make-believe 
it  often  is  with  duller  children.  She  was  able  to  immerse 
her  whole  consciousness  in  the  scene,  the  occupation  imagined, 
so  as  to  lose  all  account  of  her  actual  surroundings.  One 
evening,  at  dusk,  she  and  her  cousin  were  playing  at  chasing 
one  another  from  tree  to  tree,  for  which  the  bed-curtains  did 
duty.  The  room  had  disappeared  for  these  little  day-dreamers; 
they  were  really  in  a  gloomy  country  at  the  oncoming  of  night, 
and  when  they  were  called  to  dinner  they  heard  nothing. 
Aurore's  mother  had  finally  to  carry  her  to  the  table,  and  she 
could  ever  after  recall  the  astonishment  she  felt  on  seeing  the 
light,  the  table,  and  other  real  objects  about  her. 


GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD.  495 

Even  at  this  tender  age  the  child  came  into  contact  with 
the  large  mysterious  outer  world.  At  her  aunt's  home  at 
Chaillot  there  was  a  garden,  the  one  garden  she  knew,  a  small 
square  plot,  seeming  a  vast  region  to  Aurore,  shut  in  by  walls. 
At  the  bottom  of  this  garden,  on  a  green  terrace,  she  and  her 
cousin  used  to  play  at  fighting  battles. 

One  day  we  were  interrupted  in  our  games  by  a  great  commotion 
outside.  There  were  cries  of  '  Vive  1'Empereur  ! '  marchings  with 
quick  step,  and  then  retirings,  the  cries  continuing  all  the  while. 
The  emperor  was,  in  fact,  passing  at  some  distance,  and  we  heard 
the  tread  of  the  horses  and  the  emotion  of  the  crowd.  We  could  not 
look  over  the  walls,  but  the  whole  thing  seemed  very  beautiful  to  my 
fancy,  and  we  cried  with  all  our  strength,  '  Vive  1'Empereur !  ' 
transported  by  a  sympathetic  enthusiasm. 

She  first  saw  the  Emperor  in  1807,  from  the  good  Pierret's 
shoulders,  where,  being  a  conspicuous  object,  she  attracted 
Napoleon's  quick  eye.  '  I  was,  as  it  were,  magnetised  for  a 
moment  by  that  clear  look,  so  hard  for  an  instant,  and  suddenly 
so  benevolent  and  so  sweet.' 

The  political  storm  that  was  then  raging  on  the  sea  of 
Europe  made  itself  felt  even  in  the  far-off  and  seemingly  shel- 
tered creek  of  Aurore's  small  life.  Her  father  was  aide-de- 
camp to  Murat  at  Madrid,  and  in  1808  the  mother  resolved  to 
betake  herself  to  him  with  her  child.  It  was  a  singular  experi- 
ence for  a  girl  just  completing  her  fourth  year,  and  the  narra- 
tive of  it  is  romantic  enough.  Her  imagination  was  strangely 
affected  by  the  sight  of  the  great  mountains,  which  seemed  to 
shut  them  in  and  to  forbid  their  moving  forwards  or  backwards. 
Yet  she  felt  no  fear  at  the  postillion's  malicious  fictions  about 
brigands  which  quite  horrified  her  mother.  In  Madrid  they 
found  themselves  quartered  in  a  large  and  magnificent  palace. 
The  unaccustomed  space  and  splendour  at  first  troubled  the 
child.  She  was  tormented  by  the  huge  pictures  from  which 
big  heads  seemed  to  come  out  and  follow  her,  and  she  was 
further  alarmed  by  a  low  mirror  which  gave  her  the  first  sight 
of  her  whole  figure  and  made  her  feel  how  big  she  was. 

Murat  was  not  over  well  pleased  at  the  arrival  of  his  aide- 
de-camp's  wife  and  child,  so  an  attempt  was  made  to  propiti- 


496  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

ate  him  by  decking  the  little  maid  in  a  gay  and  coquettish 
uniform.  The  child,  who  was  no  coquette,  seems  to  have 
cared  but  little  for  this  performance,  though  she  soon  began  to- 
find  amusement  in  her  new  sumptuous  dwelling. 

As  soon  as  I  found  myself  alone  in  this  large  room  I  placed 
myself  before  the  low  glass,  and  I  tried  some  theatrical  poses.  Then 
I  took  my  white  rabbit,  and  tried  to  force  it  to  do  likewise  ;  or  rather 
I  pretended  to  offer  it  as  a  sacrifice  to  the  gods,  using  a  footstool  as. 
altar.  ...  I  had  not  the  least  feeling  of  coquetry  ;  my  pleasure 
came  from  the  make-believe  that  I  was  playing  in  a  quartette  scene 
in  which  were  two  little  girls  and  two  rabbits.  The  rabbit  and  I 
addressed,  in  pantomime,  salutations,  threats,  and  prayers  to  the 
personages  of  the  mirror,  and  we  danced  the  bolero  with  them. 

It  was  at  Madrid  that  she  first  made  acquaintance  with 
one  of  Nature's  most  fascinating  mysteries,  the  echo. 

I  studied  this  phenomenon  with  an  extreme  pleasure.  What 
struck  -me  as  most  strange  was  to  hear  my  own  name  repeated  by 
my  own  voice.  Then  there  occurred  to  me  an  odd  explanation.  I 
thought  that  I  was  double,  and  that  there  was  round  about  me 
another  "  I  "  whom  I  could  not  see,  but  who  always  saw  me,  since  he 
always  answered  me. 

She  then  combined  with  this  strange  phenomenon  another,. 
viz,,  the  red  and  blue  balls  (ocular  spectra)  that  she  got  inta 
her  eyes  after  looking  at  the  golden  globe  of  a  church  glitter- 
ing against  the  sky,  and  so  found  her  way  to  a  theory  that 
everything  had  its  double — a  theory  which,  Mr.  Tylor  and 
others  tell  us,  was  excogitated  in  very  much  the  same  way  by 
uncivilised  man.  She  spent  days  in  trying  to  get  sight  of  her 
double.  Her  .mother,  who  one  day  surprised  her  in  this  search, 
told  her  it  was  echo,  '  the  voice  in  the  air ! ' 

This  voice  in  the  air  no  longer  astonished  me,  but  it  still  charmed 
me.  I  was  satisfied  at  being  able  to  name  it,  and  to  call  to  it, '  Echo, 
are  you  there  ?  Don't  you  hear  me  ?  Good-day,  Echo  !  ' l 

The  next  event  of  deep  import  for  Aurore  was  the  sudden 
death  of  her  father  by  a  fall  from  his  horse,  which  occurred 
in  the  autumn  of  the  same  year.  The  first  visit  of  the  King 
of  Terrors  to  a  home  has  been  a  black  landmark  in  many  a 

1  Compare  above,  p.  113. 


GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD.  497 

child's  life.  Aurore  was  at  first  'annihilated'  by  excess  of 
grief  and  fear,  for,  as  she  says,  '  childhood  has  not  the  strength 
to  suffer'.  The  days  that  immediately  followed  the  bringing 
in  of  the  lifeless  body  were  passed  in  a  sort  of  stupor.  Clear 
recollection  dates  only  from  the  moment  when  she  was  to  be 
clad  in  the  conventional  black. 

The  black  made  a  strong  impression  on  me.  I  cried  in  sub- 
mitting to  it ;  for  though  I  had  worn  the  black  dress  and  veil  of 
the  Spaniards,  I  had  certainly  never  put  on  black  stockings,  and  the 
stockings  frightened  me  terribly.  I  would  have  it  that  they  were 
putting  on  me  the  legs  of  death,  and  my  mother  had  to  show  me 
that  she  wore  them  also.1 

The  father's  death  brought  a  profound  change  into  the 
child's  life.  The  despised  mother  had  already  been  recognised 
by  the  paternal  grandmother,  and  a  certain  advance  made 
towards  a  show  of  amity.  Visits  were  paid  to  the  grand- 
mother's chateau  at  Nohant,  and  it  was,  in  fact,  when  they 
were  staying  there  that  the  fatal  accident  occurred. 

The  common  loss  drew  the  two  women  together  for  a  time, 
but  the  contrasts  of  temperament  and  of  education  were  too 
powerful,  and  the  jealousy  which  had  first  directed  itself  to 
the  father  now  found  a  new  object  in  his  talented  child.  She 
has  given  us  more  than  one  excellent  description  of  mother 
and  grandmother.  The  latter,  a  blonde  with  white  and  red 
complexion,  imposing  air,  always  dressed  in  a  brown  silk  robe 
and  a  white  wig  frizzled  in  front,  was  grave  and  quiet,  '  a  verit- 
able Saxon,'  a  friend  of  the  ancien  regime,  a  disciple  of  Voltaire 
and  Rousseau,  albeit  a  stickler  for  the  conventionalities  of 
high  life.  The  mother  was  a  brunette,  of  an  ardent  tempera- 
ment, endowed  with  considerable  talent,  yet  timid  and  awkward 
before  grand  folk,  a  Spanish  nature,  jealous  and  passionate,  a 
true  democrat  withal,  and  a  worshipper  of  the  Emperor.  The 
problem  of  dividing  poor  little  Aurore  between  two  such 
women,  habiting  two  distinct  worlds,  would  have  baffled  Solo- 
mon himself.  The  grandmother  insisted  on  the  advantages  of 
bringing  up  the  child  as  a  lady,  and  the  mother,  after  a  hard 

1  Compare  this  with  other  accounts  of  the  first  impression  of 
death  given  above,  p.  237  f. 

32 


498  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

struggle,  relinquished  her  claims,  the  girl  being  handed  over  to 
the  grandmother  and  transported  into  the  new  world  of  Nohant. 
The  story  of  this  struggle,  which  tore  the  heart  of  Aurore 
as  much  as  that  of  her  mother,  is  a  tragedy  of  child-life.  Aurore's 
instincts  bound  her  to  her  mother.  She  implored  her  not  to 
give  her  up  for  money — she  understood  she  was  to  be  the 
richer  for  the  change.  She  was  beside  herself  with  joy  when 
her  grandmother  allowed  her  to  visit  the  maternal  home,  and 
she  has  given  us  a  charming  account  of  these  visits.  The 
rooms  were  poor  and  ugly  enough  by  the  side  of  her  grand- 
mother's salons ;  yet — 

How  good  my  mother  seemed,  how  amiable  my  sister,  how  droll 
and  agreeable  my  friend  Pierret !  I  could  not  stop  repeating,  '  I  am 
here  at  home  :  down  there  I  am  at  the  house  of  my  grandmother'. 
'  Zounds  ! '  said  Pierret ;  '  don't  let  her  go  and  say  chez  nous  before 
Madame  Dupin.  She  would  reproach  us  with  teaching  her  to  talk 
as  they  do  aux-z-halles  ! '  And  then  Pierret  would  burst  out  into  a 
fit  of  laughter,  for  he  was  ready  to  laugh  at  anything,  and  my 
mother  made  fun  of  him,  and  I  cried  out,  '  How  we  are  enjoying 
ourselves  at  home  ! ' 

When  she  found  that  she  was  to  live  at  Nohant  she  was 
beside  herself  with  grief,  and  implored  her  mother  to  take  her 
away,  and  to  let  her  join  her  in  some  business  enterprise.  The 
mother  seemed  at  first  to  yield  to  these  entreaties ;  but  the 
barriers  of  rank  proved  to  be  inexorable,  and  would  not  let  the 
little  orphan  pass.  The  narrative  of  the  final  departure  of  the 
mother  from  Nohant  is  deeply  pathetic.  It  was  the  eve  of  the 
parting :  and  the  child  resolved  to  write  a  letter  to  her  mother 
in  which  for  the  last  time  she  poured  out  her  passionate  love 
and  her  implorings  to  be  taken  with  her.  But  the  house  was 
sentinelled  with  hostile  maids,  and  how  to  get  the  letter  to  its 
destination  ?  At  last,  lover-like,  she  bethought  her  of  putting 
it  behind  a  portrait  of  her  grandfather  in  her  mother's  room. 
To  make  sure  of  her  finding  it,  she  hung  her  nightcap  on  the 
picture,  writing  on  it  in  pencil  '  Shake  the  portrait !  '  The 
mother  came,  but  a  provoking  maid  stayed  a  long  half-hour 
with  her.  Aurore  dared  not  move.  Then,  having  waited  an- 
other half-hour  for  the  maid  to  fall  asleep,  she  crept  to  her 


GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD.  499 

mother,  whom  she  found  reading  the  letter  and  weeping.  She 
pressed  her  child  to  her  heart,  but  would  listen  to  no  more  pro- 
posals of  flight  from  Nohant. 

I  cried  no  more — I  had  no  more  tears  ;  and  I  began  to  suffer 
from  a  trouble  more  profound  and  lacerating  than  absence.  I  said 
to  myself,  '  My  mother  does  not  love  me  as  much  as  I  love  her'. 

In  the  distraction  of  her  grief  she  resolved  that  if  it  was  un- 
bearable she  would  walk  to  Paris  and  rejoin  her  mother ;  and, 
with  characteristic  inventiveness,  thought  out,  by  help  of  her 
fairy  stories,  how  she  would  avoid  the  anguish  of  begging  by 
disposing  of  some  precious  trinkets. 

But  the  grief,  like  many  another  that  looks  crushing  at  first, 
proved  not  unbearable.  In  time  the  child  learnt  to  take  kindly 
to  her  new  home,  and  even  to  love  the  stately  and  severe-look- 
ing grandmamma. 

The  Grandmother  s  Regime. 

It  was  verily  a  new  home,  this  country  house  at  Nohant. 
Besides  the  grave  grandmamma  bent  on  drilling  Aurore  into  the 
proprieties,  there  was  another  solemn  figure  in  Deschartres, 
her  friend  and  counsellor,  who  combined  the  functions  of 
steward  of  the  estate  and  tutor  of  the  young  people.  His  pupils 
were  Aurore  herself,  a  half-brother  Hippolyte,  whose  birth 
added  one  more  irregularity  to  the  family  history,  and  of  whom 
the  Histoire  has  much  to  say.  Hippolyte  was  a  wild-tempered 
youth,  more  given  to  mischievous  adventure  and  practical  joking 
than  to  serious  study,  and  proved  a  considerable  set-off  to  the 
formal  gravity  of  the  elders  of  the  household.  A  second  youth- 
ful companion  was  supplied  in  Clotilde,  a  girl  of  humble 
parentage,  who  was  probably  introduced  by  the  authorities  as 
a  concession  to  Rousseau's  teaching,  and  supplied  a  link 
between  the  young  lady  and  the  peasant  world  she  was  to  love 
and  to  portray.  Beyond  the  house  was  the  unpretending 
country  of  Le  Bas  Berry,  with  its  '  landes '  or  wastes,  the 
'  Valee  Noire  '  of  Aurore's  early  descriptions,  which  more  than 
one  of  our  writers  have  found  half  English  in  character,  and 
which  was  to  become  to  Aurore  what  the  Midlands  were  to 
George  Eliot. 


500  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

The  first  effect  of  this  forced  separation  from  the  mother 
seems  to  have  been  to  throw  Aurore  in  upon  herself,  and  to 
confirm  her  natural  tendency  to  reverie.  She  says  much 
at  this  stage  of  her  day-dreaming,  which  overtook  her  both 
when  alone  and  when  joining  her  companions  in  play.  It 
visited  her  regularly  as  she  sat  at  her  mother's  feet  in  the 
evening  listening  to  her  reading,  with  an  old  screen  covered 
with  green  taffeta  between  her  and  the  fire. 

I  saw  a  little  of  the  fire  through  this  worn  taffeta,  and  it  formed 
on  it  little  stars,  whose  radiation  I  increased  by  blinking  my  eyes. 
Then  little  by  little  I  lost  the  meaning  of  the  phrases  which  my 
mother  read.  Her  voice  threw  me  into  a  kind  of  moral  stupor,  in 
which  it  was  impossible  for  me  to  follow  an  idea.  Images  began  to 
shape  themselves  before  me,  and  came  and  settled  on  the  green 
screen.  They  were  woods,  meadows,  rivers,  towns  of  a  grotesque 
and  gigantic  architecture,  as  I  have  often  seen  them  in  dreams  ; 
enchanted  palaces  with  gardens  like  nothing  that  exists,  with 
thousands  of  birds  of  azure,  gold,  and  purple,  which  sprang  on  the 
flowers  and  let  themselves  be  caught.  .  .  .  There  were  roses — green, 
black,  violet,  and  especially  blue.1  ...  I  closed  my  eyes  and  still 
saw  them,  but  when  I  reopened  them  I  could  only  find  them  again 
upon  the  screen. 

As  at  Madrid,  so  at  Nohant :  the  splendour  of  her  new 
home  caused  her  alarm  at  first.  On  the  wall-paper  of  her  bed- 
room above  each  door  was  a  large  medallion  with  a  figure  :  the 
one  a  joyous  dancing  Flora  ;  the  other  a  grave,  severe  Bac- 
chante, standing  with  arm  stretched  out  leaning  on  her  thyrsus. 
The  first  was  beloved,  the  second  dreaded.  The  child's  bed 
was  so  placed  that  she  had  to  turn  her  back  on  her  favourite. 
She  hid  her  head  under  the  bed-clothes  and  tried  not  to  see  that 
terribly  stern  Bacchante,  but  in  vain. 

In  the  middle  of  the  night  I  saw  it  leave  its  medallion,  glide  along 
the  door,  grow  as  big  as  a  real  person  (as  children  say),  and,  walking 
to  the  opposite  door,  try  to  snatch  the  pretty  nymph  from  her  niche. 
She  uttered  piercing  cries,  but  the  Bacchante  paid  no  heed  to  them. 
She  pulled  and  tore  the  paper  till  the  nymph  detached  herself  and 
fled  into  the  middle  of  the  chamber.  The  other  pursued  her  thither, 
and  as  the  poor  fugitive  threw  herself  on  my  bed  in  order  to  hide  her- 

1  A  blue  rose  was  for  a  long  time  the  favourite  dream  of  Balzac. 


GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD.  501 

self  under  my  curtain,  the  furious  Bacchante  came  towards  me  and 
pierced  us  both  with  her  thyrsus,  which  had  become  a  steeled  lance, 
whose  every  stroke  was  to  me  a  wound  of  which  I  felt  the  pain. 

In  her  play  with  Ursula  and  Hippolyte  she  continued  to 
indulge  in  her  passion  for  vivid  imaginative  realisation.  When 
playing  at  crossing  the  windings  of  a  river,  rudely  marked  with 
chalk  on  the  floor,  five  minutes  would  suffice  to  generate  this 
kind  of  hallucination. 

I  lost  all  notion  of  reality,  and  believed  I  could  see  the  trees, 
the  water,  the  rocks — a  vast  country — and  the  sky,  now  bright,  now 
laden  with  clouds  which  were  about  to  burst  and  increase  the  danger 
of  crossing  the  river.  In  what  a  vast  space  children  think  they  are 
acting  when  they  thus  walk  from  table  to  bed,  from  the  fireplace  to 
the  door! 

On  one  of  these  occasions,  Hippolyte,  with  the  boy's  bent 
to  realism,  took  the  water  jug,  and  pouring  its  contents  on  the 
floor,  produced  a  closer  semblance  of  the  river.  The  natural 
consequence  followed  :  the  children,  wholly  absorbed  in  their 
little  drama,  were  caught  by  Aurore's  mother  in  the  very  act  of 
paddling  with  naked  feet  and  legs  in  a  dirty  puddle  formed  by 
the  water  and  the  staining  of  the  floor,  and  were  visited  with 
summary  chastisement. 

More  daring  pranks  would  sometimes  be  ventured  on  with 
Hippolyte.  One  day,  as  Deschartres  was  away  shooting,  the 
boy  got  one  of  his  works  on  Incantation,  and  tried,  much  in 
the  fashion  of  Tom  Sawyer  and  Huckleberry  Finn,  to  get  a 
peep  at  the  supernatural.  Mysterious  lines,  digits,  etc.,  were 
duly  traced  on  the  floor  with  chalk,  and  other  preparations 
carried  out.  Then  they  awaited  with  deepening  agitation  the 
first  indication  of  success,  the  darting  out  of  a  blue  flame  on 
certain  digits  or  figures.  Long  minutes  passed,  yet  no  blue 
flame,  no  devil's  horns,  appeared  to  thrill  the  eager  watchers. 
At  length  Hippolyte,  in  order  to  keep  up  the  girl's  excitement, 
put  his  ear  to  the  floor  and  declared  that  he  could  hear  the 
crackling  sound  of  a  flame.  But  it  was  all  in  vain.  After  all 
it  was  but  a  game,  '  though  a  game  that  made  our  hearts 
beat'. 

Hippolyte  was  given  to  dangerous  experiments,  which  he 


502  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

dignified  by  high-sounding  names.  Thus  he  one  day  put 
gunpowder  into  a  big  log  and  threw  this  into  the  fire,  with 
the  view  of  blowing  the  saucepan  into  the  kitchen,  an  occupation 
which  he  cheerfully  described  as  studying  the  theory  of  vol- 
canoes. He  succeeded  in  leading  on  Aurore  into  pranks  of  a 
decidedly  hoydenish  character,  such  as  must  have  sadly 
grieved  the  decorous  grandmamma  had  she  known  of  them. 
They  one  day  went  so  far  as  to  dig  a  trough  across  the  garden- 
path,  fill  this  with  light  wet  earth,  duly  cover  it  with  sticks 
and  leaves,  and  then  watch  Deschartres,  who  was  particularly 
vain  of  his  white  stockings,  as  with  the  stiff,  pompous  gait 
of  the  pedagogue  he  marched  straight  into  the  trap. 

Such  a  child  as  Aurore,  with  her  fits  of  reverie  alternating 
with  somewhat  rude  outbursts  of  animal  spirits,  was  not  easily 
drilled  into  those  proprieties  on  which  Madame  Dupin  set  so 
high  a  value.  This  good  lady  took  great  pains  to  make 
Aurore  walk  properly,  wear  her  gloves,  give  up  the  familiar 
'thou,'  and  adopt  the  stilted  mode  of  address  of  the  fashionable 
world.  But  she  did  not  appreciate  these  educational  experi- 
ments. '  It  seemed  to  me  that  she  shut  me  in  with  herself  in 
a  big  box  when  she  said  to  me,  "  Amusez-vous  tranquillement".' 
While,  for  the  sake  of  pleasing  her  guardian,  she  outwardly 
conformed  to  the  rules  of  society,  in  her  heart  she  remained  a 
rebel,  and  was  dreadfully  bored,  when  she  ceased  to  be  amused, 
by  her  grandmother's  '  old  Countesses  '.  One  exception  to  her 
general  dislike  of  the  grand  personages  she  had  now  to  meet 
was  made  in  the  case  of  her  great-uncle,  the  Abbe  of  Beaumont. 
He  seems  to  have  been  a  man  of  ability  and  culture,  as  well 
as  of  amiable  heart,  and  he  proved  a  good  friend  of  the  family 
after  the  death  of  Colonel  Dupin  by  improvising  the  distraction 
of  a  comedy  at  Nohant,  in  which  Deschartres'  flute  did  duty  as 
orchestra,  and  the  little  Aurore  was  called  on  to  dance  a  ballet 
all  by  herself.  The  Abbe's  house,  which  was  decorated  through- 
out in  the  style  of  Louis  XIV.,  filled  her  with  admiration,  and 
she  loved  to  wander,  candle  in  hand,  alone  through  its  vast 
salons  while  the  older  people  were  absorbed  in  their  cards. 
This  grand-uncle,  by-the-bye,  served  in  part  as  the  prototype 
of  the  Canon  in  Consuelo. 


GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD.  503 

The  formal  teaching  was  mostly  handed  over  to  Deschartres, 
though  the  grandmother  gave  instruction  in  music.  Aurore 
can  hardly  be  said  to  have  been  a  backward  child.  She  read 
well  at  four.  Towards  five  she  learnt  to  write,  but  not  having 
patience  to  copy  out  the  alphabet,  struck  out  an  original  ortho- 
graphy of  her  own,  and  indited  letters  in  this  to  Ursule  and 
Hippolyte.  It  was,  she  tells  us,  very  simple  and  full  of 
hieroglyphics.  She  devoured  a  certain  class  of  books,  and 
found  delight  for  five  or  six  months  in  the  stories  of  Madame 
d'Aulnoy  and  of  Perrault,  which  she  came  across  at  Nohant. 
She  adds  that  though  she  has  never  re-read  them  since,  she 
could  repeat  them  all  from  beginning  to  end.  She  tried,  out  of 
regard  for  her  grandmamma,  to  take  kindly  to  arithmetic,  Latin, 
and  French  versification,  which  Deschartres  taught  her,  but 
she  could  not  master  her  dislike.  After  a  little  scene,  in  which 
the  passionate  Deschartres  threw  a  big  dictionary  at  the  girl's 
head,  the  Latin  had  to  be  given  up  altogether.  The  study 
she  liked  best  was  history,  since  it  gave  her  the  chance  of 
indulging  in  the  pleasures  of  imagination.  She  had  to  prepare 
extracts  from  a  book  for  her  grandmother,  and  as  she  soon 
found  that  these  were  not  compared  with  the  original,  she 
began  to  introduce  additions  of  her  own.  Without  altering 
essential  facts,  she  tells  us,  she  would  place  the  historical 
personage  in  new  imaginary  situations,  so  as  to  develop  the 
character  more  completely.  In  truth,  she  seems  to  have  used 
history  very  much  after  the  fashion  which  Aristotle,  and  after 
him  Lessing,  recommend  to  the  poets,  varying  the  situation, 
but  leaving  the  character  intact. 

In  addition  to  these  more  solid  studies,  the  young  lady 
had  special  lessons  in  dancing  and  in  calligraphy.  Both  the 
dancing-master  and  the  writing-master  came  in  for  her  ridicule. 
The  latter,  she  tells  us,  was 

a  professor  of  large  pretensions,  capable  of  spoiling  the  best  hand 
with  his  systems.  .  .  .  He  had  invented  various  instruments  by 
which  he  compelled  his  pupils  to  hold  up  the  head,  to  keep  the 
elbow  free,  three  fingers  extended  on  the  pen,  and  the  little  finger 
stretched  on  the  paper  in  such  a  way  as  to  support  the  weight  of  the 
hand. 


504  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

It  must  have  been  a  joyous  moment  for  Aurore  when  she 
was  set  free  from  the  restraints  and  impositions  of  the  chateau 
for  a  couple  of  hours'  visit  to  some  adjoining  farm,  where  she 
could  shout,  laugh,  and  romp  with  the  peasant  girls.  Here 
she  would  climb  the  trees,  rush  wildly  down  from  the  top  to 
the  bottom  of  a  mountain  of  sheaves  in  the  barn,  and  do  other 
outrageous  things  ;  or  when  the  dream-mood  was  on  her  she 
would  quietly  contemplate  her  rustic  friends  as  they  tended 
the  lambs,  hunted  for  eggs,  or  gathered  fruit  from  the 
orchard,  weaving  their  figures  into  one  of  her  interminable 
romances. 

Among  the  charming  rural  pictures  that  her  pen  has  drawn 
for  us  in  these  recollections  there  is  one  of  a  swineherd,  called 
Plaisir,  for  whom  she  conceived  a  strange  friendship.  She 
loved  to  watch  his  odd  figure,  always  clothed  in  a  blouse  and 
hemp  trousers,  '  which  with  his  hands  and  naked  feet  had  taken 
the  colour  and  the  hardness  of  the  earth,'  armed  with  a  trian- 
gular iron  instrument,  '  the  sceptre  of  swineherds,'  and  looking 
like  '  a  gnome  of  the  glebe,  a  kind  of  devil  between  man  and 
werwolf.  As  the  swine  turned  up  the  soil  with  their  snouts, 
the  birds  would  come  to  forage. 

Sometimes  these  birds  perched  on  the  hog  merely  to  get  warm, 
or  in  order  the  better  to  observe  the  labour  from  which  they  were 
to  profit.  I  have  often  seen  an  old  ashy  rook  balancing  himself 
there  on  one  leg  with  a  pensive  and  melancholy  air,  while  the  hog 
bored  deeply  in  the  soil,  and  by  these  labours  caused  it  oscillations 
which  disturbed  it,  rendered  it  impatient,  and  finally  drove  it  to 
correct  this  clumsiness  by  strokes  of  its  beak. 

Nor  was  it  merely  as  playmates  that  the  young  lady  from 
the  chateau  deigned  to  associate  with  the  peasantry.  She 
threw  herself  with  ardent  sympathy  into  the  hard  toilsome  life 
of  the  people.  One  day,  as  she  chanced  to  see  an  old 
woman  stooping,  as  well  as  her  stiff  limbs  allowed  her,  to 
gather  sticks  in  her  grandmother's  garden,  she  set  vigorously 
to  work  with  bill-hook  cutting  dry  wood,  working  late  into  the 
evening,  and  forgetting  all  about  her  meal,  for  she  was  '  strong 
as  a  peasant  girl '.  She  then  set  out  with  blood-stained  face 
and  hands,  and  with  a  weight  greater  than  that  of  her  own 


GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD.  505 

body,  for  the  poor  woman's  hut,  where  she  enjoyed  a  well- 
earned  slice  from  her  black  loaf. 

This  contact  with  the  rustic  mind,  so  oddly  introduced  into 
the  fashionable  scheme  of  education,  exerted  a  profound  effect 
on  the  child's  imagination.  She  listened  eagerly  to  the  super- 
stitious stories  which  the  hemp-dressers  related  when  they 
came  to  crush  the  hemp,  sitting  in  the  moonlight  within  view 
of  the  crosses  of  a  cemetery.  Among  these  were  a  sacristan's 
gruesome  stories  of  interments  and  of  the  rats  that  lived  in  the 
belfry.  The  doings  of  those  rats,  she  tells  us,  would  of  them- 
selves fill  a  volume.  He  knew  them  all,  and  had  given  them 
the  names  of  the  more  important  among  the  deceased  villagers. 
They  were  very  clever,  and  could,  among  other  exploits,  arrange 
grains  or  beans  given  them  in  the  form  of  a  circle  enclosing  a 
cross.  It  is  hardly  surprising  to  learn  that  these  stories  robbed 
Aurore  of  her  sleep. 

The  rustic  legend  of  the  grande  bete  much  exercised  the 
girl's  brain.  She  tried  to  reconcile  the  superstition  with  what 
she  had  learnt  about  the  animal  kingdom.  And  in  this  way 
she  concluded  that  the  creature  must  be  a  member  of  a  species 
almost  entirely  extinct.  She  imagined  that  it  was  leading  a 
solitary  existence,  being  able  to  survive  the  rest  of  its  species 
by  hiding  during  the  day  and  wandering  at  night.  This  weird 
conception  soon  began  to  expand  into  a  zoological  romance. 

If  the  girl's  imaginative  impulse  had  been  excited  by  her 
historical  studies,  it  could  not  but  be  roused  to  preternatural 
activity  by  the  stirring  political  events  of  the  time.  In  1812, 
when  she  was  just  eight  years  old,  occurred  Napoleon's  dis- 
astrous invasion  of  Russia.  The  absence  of  all  news  of  the 
army  for  fifteen  days  gave  a  new  direction  to  her  reverie. 

I  imagined  that  I  possessed  wings,  that  I  darted  through  space, 
and  that  peering  into  the  abysses  of  the  horizon  I  discovered  the 
vast  snows  and  the  endless  steppes  of  White  Russia.  I  hovered, 
took  my  bearings  in  the  air,  and  at  last  spied  the  wandering  columns 
of  our  unhappy  legions.  I  guided  them  towards  France — for  that 
which  tormented  me  the  most  was  that  they  did  not  know  where 
they  were,  and  that  they  were  moving  towards  Asia,  plunging  more 
and  more  into  deserts  as  they  turned  their  backs  on  the  West. 


506  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

A  quaint  illustration  of  the  conflict  the  child's  mind  was 
passing  through  under  the  contradictory  impressions  of 
Napoleon's  character  received  from  her  mother  and  from  her 
new  instructors  at  Nohant,  is  given  us  in  the  following:  — 

Once  I  dreamt  I  carried  him  (the  Emperor)  through  space  and 
set  him  on  the  cupola  of  the  Tuileries.  There  I  had  a  long  talk 
with  him,  put  him  a  thousand  questions,  and  said  to  him,  '  If  thou 
prove  thyself  by  thy  answers,  as  people  say,  a  monster,  an  ambitious 
man,  a  drinker  of  blood,  I  will  cast  thee  down  and  dash  thee  to  pieces 
on  the  threshold  of  thy  palace  ;  but  if  thou  justify  thyself,  if  thou 
be  what  I  have  believed,  the  good,  the  great,  the  just  Emperor,  the 
father  of  the  French,  I  will  replace  thee  on  thy  throne,  and  with  my 
sword  of  fire  defend  thee  from  thy  enemies'.  He  thereupon  opened 
his  heart  and  confessed  that  he  had  committed  many  faults  from 
too  great  a  love  of  glory,  but  he  swore  that  he  loved  France,  and 
that  henceforth  he  would  only  think  of  the  happiness  of  the  people. 
On  this  I  touched  him  with  my  sword  of  fire,  which  rendered  him 
invulnerable. 

A   Self -evolved  Religion. 

Perhaps  there  is  no  domain  of  children's  thought  and  feel- 
ing that  is  more  remote  from  our  older  experience,  and  conse- 
quently less  easily  understood  by  us,  than  that  of  religion. 
Their  first  ideas  about  the  supernatural  are  indeed,  as  we  have 
seen  above,  though  supplied  by  us,  not  controlled  by  us. 

To  most  children,  presumably,  religious  instruction  comes 
— at  first  at  least — with  a  commanding,  authoritative  force.  The 
story  of  the  supernatural,  of  the  Divine  Father,  of  Heaven, 
and  the  rest,  cannot  be  scrutinised  by  the  child — save,  indeed, 
in  respect  of  its  inner  consistency — for  it  tells  of  things  un- 
observable  by  sense,  and  so  having  no  direct  contact  with 
childish  experience.  Their  natural  tendency  is  to  believe,  in 
a  submissive,  childish  way,  not  troubling  about  the  proof  of 
the  mystery. 

But  even  in  this  submissive  acceptance  there  lies  the  germ 
of  a  subsequent  transformation.  If  the  child  is  to  believe,  he 
must  believe  in  his  own  fashion  ;  he  must  give  body  and  reality 
to  the  ideas  of  Divine  majesty  and  goodness,  and  of  spiritual 
approach  and  worship.  Hence  the  way  in  which  children  are 


GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD.  507 

apt  to  startle  the  reverent  and  amuse  the  profane  by  divulging 
their  crude  material  fancies  about  things  spiritual. 

Such  materialisation  of  spiritual  conceptions  is  apt  to 
bring  trouble  to  the  young  mind.  It  is  all  so  confusing — 
this  exalted  Personage,  who  nevertheless  is  quite  unlike  earthly 
dignitaries,  this  all-encompassing  and  never-failing  Presence, 
which  all  the  time  refuses  to  reveal  itself  to  eye  or  ear.  How 
much  real  suffering  this  may  entail  in  the  case  of  children  at 
once  serious  and  imaginative  we  shall  never  know.  The  de- 
scription of  the  boy  Waldo,  in  that  strangely  fascinating  book, 
The  Story  of  an  African  Farm,  kneeling  bare-headed  in  the 
blazing  sun  and  offering  his  dinner  on  an  altar  to  God,  may 
look  exaggerated  to  some  ;  but  it  is  essentially  true  to  some  of 
the  deepest  instincts  of  childhood.  The  child  that  believes  at 
all,  believes  intensely,  and  his  belief  grows  all-commanding  and 
prolific  of  action. 

While,  however,  it  is  the  common  tendency  of  children 
passively  to  adopt  their  elders'  religious  beliefs,  merely  inventing 
their  own  modes  of  giving  effect  to  them,  there  is  a  certain 
amount  of  originality  exercised  in  the  formation  of  the  beliefs 
themselves.  Stories  of  independent  creations  of  a  religious 
cult  by  children  are  no  doubt  rare ;  and  this  for  the  very  good 
reason  that  it  needs  the  greatest  force  of  self-assertion  to  resist 
the  pressure  of  the  traditional  faith  on  the  childish  mind.  The 
early  recollections  of  George  Sand  furnish  what  is  probably 
the  most  remarkable  instance  of  childish  daring  in  fashioning 
a  new  religion,  with  its  creed  and  ritual  all  complete. 

Poor  little  Aurore's  religious  difficulties  and  experiments  at 
solution  can  only  be  understood  in  the  light  of  her  confusing 
surroundings.  From  her  mother — ardent,  imaginative,  and  of 
a  '  simple  and  confiding  faith  ' — she  had  caught  some  of  the 
glow  of  a  fervent  piety.  Then  she  suddenly  passed  into  the 
chilling  air  of  Nohant,  where  the  grandmother  equalled  her 
master  Voltaire  in  cynical  contempt  of  the  revered  mysteries. 
The  effect  of  this  sudden  change  of  temperature  on  the 
warm  young  heart  was,  as  might  have  been  anticipated,  ex- 
tremely painful.  Madame  Dupin  at  once  recognised  the  girl's 
temperament,  and  saw  with  dismay  the  leaning  to  '  super- 


508  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

stition,'  a  trait  which  she  disliked  none  the  less  for  recognis- 
ing in  it  a  bequest  from  the  despised  grisette  mother.  So 
she  applied  herself  with  all  the  energy  of  her  strong  char- 
acter to  counteract  the  child's  religious  tendencies.  Now 
this  might  have  proved  neither  a  difficult  nor  lengthy  pro- 
cess if  she  had  consistently  set  her  face  against  all  religious 
observances.  But  though  a  disciple  of  Voltaire,  she  was  also 
a  lady  with  a  conspicuous  social  position,  and  had  to  make 
her  account  with  the  polite  world  and  the  '  bienseances '.  So 
Aurore  was  not  only  allowed  but  encouraged  to  attend  Mass 
and  to  prepare  for  the  '  First  Communion  '  like  other  young 
ladies  of  her  station.  Madame  Dupin  well  knew  the  risk  she 
was  running  with  so  inflammable  a  material,  but  she  counted 
on  her  own  sufficiency  as  a  prompt  extinguisher  of  any  incon- 
veniently attaching  spark  of  devotion.  In  this  way  the  young  girl 
underwent  the  uncommon  if  not  unique  experience  of  a  regular 
religious  instruction,  and,  concurrently  with  this  and  from  the 
very  hand  that  had  imposed  it,  a  severe  training  in  rational 
scepticism  and  contempt  for  the  faith  of  the  vulgar. 

Even  if  Aurore  had  not  been  in  her  inmost  heart  something 
of  a  devote,  this  parallel  discipline  in  outward  conformity  and 
inward  ridicule  would  have  been  hurtful  enough.  As  it  was,  it 
brought  into  her  young  life  all  the  pain  of  contradiction,  all  the 
bitterness  of  enforced  rebellion. 

The  attendance  on  Mass  could  hardly  have  seemed  dangerous 
to  Madame  Dupin.  The  old  cure  of  Nohant  was  not  troubled 
with  an  excess  of  reverence.  When  ordering  a  procession,  in 
deference  to  the  mandate  of  his  archbishop,  he  would  seize  the 
occasion  for  expressing  his  contempt  for  such  mummeries.  In 
his  congregation  there  was  a  queer  old  lady,  who  used  to  utter 
her  disapproval  of  the  ceremony  with  a  frankness  that  would 
have  seemed  brutal  even  in  a  theatre,  by  exclaiming,  '  Quelle 
diable  de  Messe  ! '  And  the  object  of  this  criticism,  on  turning 
to  the  congregation  to  wind  up  with  the  familiar  Dominus 
vobiscum,  would  reply  in  an  under-tone,  yet  loudly  enough  for 
Aurore's  ear,  '  Allez  au  diable  !  '  That  the  child  attached  little 
solemnity  to  the  ritual  is  evident  from  her  account  to  the 
grandmother  of  her  first  visit  to  the  Mass  :  '  I  saw  the  cure 


GEORGE   SAND'S   CHILDHOOD.  509 

who  took  his  breakfast  standing  up   before  a  big  table,  and 
turned  round  on  us  now  and  then  to  call  us  names  '. 

The  preparation  for  the  '  First  Communion '  was  a  more 
serious  matter.  The  girl  had  now  to  study  the  life  of  Christ, 
and  her  heart  was  touched  by  the  story.  '  The  Gospel  (she 
writes)  and  the  divine  drama  of  the  life  and  death  of  Jesus 
drew  from  me  in  secret  torrents  of  tears.'  Her  grandmother, 
by  making  now  and  again  'a  short,  dry  appeal  to  her  reason,' 
succeeded  in  getting  her  to  reject  the  notion  of  miracles  and  of 
the  divinity  of  Jesus.  But  though  she  was  thus  unable  to 
reach  '  full  faith,'  she  resolved  en  revanche  to  deny  nothing 
internally.  Accordingly  she  learnt  her  catechism  'like  a  parrot, 
without  seeking  to  understand  it,  and  without  thinking  of 
making  fun  of  its  mysteries '.  For  the  rest,  she  felt  a  special 
repugnance  towards  the  confessional.  She  was  able  to  recall 
a  few  small  childish  faults,  such  as  telling  a  lie  to  her  mother 
in  order  to  screen  the  maid  Rose,  but  feared  the  list  would  not 
satisfy  the  confessor.  Happily,  however,  he  proved  to  be  more 
lenient  than  she  had  anticipated,  and  dismissed  his  young 
penitent  with  a  nominal  penance. 

The  day  that  makes  an  epoch  in  the  Catholic  girl's  life  at 
length  arrived,  and  Aurore  was  decked  out  like  the  rest  of  the 
candidates.  The  grandmother,  having  given  a  finishing  touch 
to  her  instructions  by  bidding  Aurore,  while  going  through  the 
act  of  decorum  with  the  utmost  decency,  '  not  to  outrage 
Divine  wisdom  and  human  reason  to  such  an  extent  as  to 
believe  that  she  was  going  to  eat  her  Creator,'  accompanied 
her  to  the  church.  It  was  a  hard  ordeal.  The  incongruous 
appearance  of  the  deistic  grandmamma  in  the  place  sufficed  in 
itself  to  throw  the  girl's  thoughts  into  disorder.  She  felt  the 
hollowness  of  the  whole  thing,  and  asked  herself  whether  she 
and  her  grandmother  were  not  committing  an  act  of  hypocrisy. 
More  than  once  her  repugnance  reached  such  a  pitch  that  she 
thought  of  getting  up  and  saying  to  her  grandmother,  '  Enough 
of  this  :  let  us  go  away '.  But  relief  came  in  another  shape. 
Going  over  the  scene  of  the  '  Last  Supper '  in  her  thoughts, 
she  all  at  once  recognised  that  the  words  of  Jesus,  'This  is 
my  body  and  my  blood,'  were  nothing  but  a  metaphor.  He 


510  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

was  too  holy  and  too  great  to  have  wished  to  deceive  his 
disciples.  This  discover}7  of  the  symbolism  of  the  rite  calmed 
her  by  removing  all  feeling  of  its  grotesqueness.  She  left  the 
Communion  table  quite  at  peace.  Her  contentment  gave  a 
new  expression  to  her  face,  which  did  not  escape  the  anxious 
eyes  of  Madame  Dupin  :  '  Softened  and  terrified,  divided 
between  the  fear  of  having  made  me  devout  and  that  of  having 
caused  me  to  lie  to  myself,  she  pressed  me  gently  to  her  heart 
and  dropped  some  tears  on  my  veil '. 

It  was  out  of  this  conflicting  and  agitating  experience,  the 
full  sense  of  the  beauty  of  the  Christian  faith  and  the  equally 
full  comprehension  of  the  sceptic's  destructive  logic,  that  there 
was  born  in  Aurore's  imagination  the  idea  of  a  new  private 
religion  with  which  nobody  else  should  meddle.  She  gives  us 
the  origin  of  this  strange  conception  clearly  enough  : — 

Since  all  religion  is  a  fiction  (I  thought),  let  us  make  a  story 
which  may  be  a  religion,  or  a  religion  which  may  be  a  story.  I  don't 
believe  in  my  stories,  but  they  give  me  just  as  much  happiness  as 
though  I  did.1  Besides,  should  I  chance  to  believe  in  them  from 
time  to  time,  nobody  will  know  it,  nobody  will  dispel  my  illusion  by 
proving  to  me  that  I  am  dreaming. 

The  form  and  the  name  of  her  new  divinity  came  to  her  in 
a  dream.  He  was  to  be  called  'Corambe'.  His  attributes 
must  be  given  in  her  own  words  : — 

He  was  pure  and  charitable  as  Jesus,  radiant  and  beautiful  as 
Gabriel ;  but  it  was  needful  to  add  a  little  of  the  grace  of  the 
nymphs  and  of  the  poetry  of  Orpheus.  Accordingly  he  had  a  less 
austere  form  than  the  God  of  the  Christian,  and  a  more  spiritual 
feeling  than  those  of  Homer.  And  then  I  was  obliged  to  complete 
him  by  investing  him  on  occasion  with  the  guise  of  a  woman,  for 
that  which  I  had  up  to  this  time  loved  the  best,  and  understood  the 
best,  was  a  woman — my  mother.  And  so  it  was  often  under  the 
semblance  of  a  woman  that  he  appeared  to  me.  In  short,  he  had 
no  sex,  and  assumed  all  sorts  of  aspects.  .  .  .  Corambe  should  have 
all  the  attributes  of  physical  and  moral  beauty,  the  gift  of  eloquence, 
the  omnipotent  charm  of  the  arts — above  all,  the  magic  of  musical 

1  She  here  refers  to  the  stories  she  had  long  been  accustomed  to 
compose  for  her  own  private  delectation. 


GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD.  511 

improvisation.  I  wished  to  love  him  as  a  friend,  as  a  sister,  while 
revering  him  as  a  God.  I  would  not  be  afraid  of  him,  and  to  this 
end  I  desired  that  he  should  have  some  of  our  errors  and  weak- 
nesses. I  sought  that  one  which  could  be  reconciled  with  his  per- 
fection, and  I  found  it  in  an  excess  of  indulgence  and  kindness. 

The  religious  idea  took  an  historical  form,  and  Aurore  pro- 
ceeded to  develop  the  several  phases  of  Corambe's  mundane 
existence  in  a  series  of  sacred  books  or  songs.  She  supposed 
that  she  must  have  composed  not  less  than  a  thousand  of 
such  songs  without  ever  being  tempted  to  write  down  a  line 
of  them.  In  each  of  these  the  deity  Corambe,  who  had  be- 
come human  on  touching  the  earth,  was  brought  into  a  fresh 
group  of  persons.  These  were  all  good  people  ;  for  although 
there  existed  wicked  ones,  one  did  not  see  them,  but  only  knew 
of  them  by  the  effects  of  their  malice  and  madness.  Corambe 
always  appears,  like  Jesus — and  one  may  add,  like  Buddha — 
as  the  beneficent  one,  spending  himself,  and  suffering  per- 
secutions and  martyrdom,  in  the  cause  of  humanity. 

This  occupation  of  the  imagination  developed  '  a  kind  of 
gentle  hallucination'.  Aurore  soon  learned  to  betake  herself 
to  her  hero-divinity  for  comfort  and  delight.  Even  when  her 
peasant  companions  chattered  around  her  she  was  able  to  lose 
herself  in  her  world  of  religious  romance. 

The  idea  of  sacred  books  was  followed  by  that  of  a  temple 
and  a  ritual.  For  this  purpose  she  chose  a  little  wood  in  her 
grandmother's  garden,  a  perfect  thicket  of  young  trees  and 
undergrowth,  into  which  nobody  ever  penetrated,  and  which, 
during  the  season  of  leaves,  was  proof  against  any  spying  eye. 
Here,  in  a  tiny,  natural  chamber  of  green,  carpeted  with  a  mag- 
nificent moss,  she  proceeded  to  erect  an  altar  against  a  tree  stem, 
decking  it  with  shells  and  other  ornaments  and  crowning  it 
with  a  wreath  of  flowers  suspended  from  a  branch  above. 
The  little  priestess,  having  made  her  temple,  sat  down  on  the 
moss  to  consider  the  question  of  sacrifices. 

To  kill  animals,  or  even  insects,  in  order  to  please  him,  appeared 
to  me  barbarous  and  unworthy  of  his  ideal  kindliness.  I  persuaded 
myself  to  do  just  the  opposite — that  is,  to  restore  life  and  liberty  on 
his  altar  to  all  the  creatures  that  I  could  procure. 


512  STUDIES   OF   CHILDHOOD. 

Her  offering  included  butterflies,  lizards,  little  green  frogs, 
and  birds.  These  she  would  put  into  a  box,  lay  it  on  the 
altar,  and  then  open  it,  '  after  having  invoked  the  good  genius 
of  liberty  and  protection  '. 

In  these  mimic  rites,  hardly  removed  from  genuine  childish 
play,  the  doubt-agitated  girl  found  repose  :  '  I  had  then  de- 
licious reveries,  and  while  seeking  the  marvellous,  which  had 
for  me  so  great  an  attraction,  I  began  to  find  the  vague  idea 
and  the  pure  feeling  of  a  religion  according  to  my  heart '. 

But  the  sweet  sanctuary  did  not  long  remain  inviolate. 
One  day  her  boy  playmate  came  to  look  for  her,  and  tracked 
her  to  her  secret  grove.  He  was  awe-struck  at  the  sight,  and 
exclaimed  :  '  Ah,  miss,  the  pretty  little  altar  of  the  Fete-Dieu!' 
He  was  for-embellishing  it  still  further,  but  she  felt  the  charm 
was  destroyed. 

From  the  instant  that  other  feet  than  mine  had  trodden  his 
sanctuary,  Corambe  ceased  to  dwell  in  it.  The  dryads  and  the 
cherubim  deserted  it,  and  it  seemed  to  me  as  if  my  ceremonies  and 
my  sacrifices  were  from  this  time  only  childishness,  that  I  had  not 
in  truth  been  in  earnest.  I  destroyed  the  temple  with  as  much  care 
as  I  had  built  it;  I  dug  a  hole  at  the  foot  of  the  tree,  where  I  buried 
the  garlands,  the  shells,  and  all  the  rustic  ornaments,  under  the 
ruins  of  the  altar. 

This  story  of  Aurore's  religious  experiment  cannot  fail  to 
remind  the  reader  of  biography  of  the  child  Goethe's  well- 
known  essays  in  the  same  direction.  The  boy's  mind,  it  will 
be  remembered,  had  been  greatly  exercised  with  the  religious 
problem,  first  of  all  under  the  impression  of  horror  caused  by 
the  earthquake  at  Lisbon,  and  later  from  having  to  listen  to 
accounts  of  the  new  sects — Separatists,  Moravians,  and  the 
rest — who  sought  a  closer  communion  with  the  deity  than  was 
possible  through  the  somewhat  cold  ritual  of  the  established 
religion.  Stirred  by  their  example,  he  tried  also  to  realise  a 
closer  approach  to  the  Divine  Being.  He  conceived  him,  he 
tells  us,  as  standing  in  immediate  connexion  with  Nature. 
So  he  invented  a  form  of  worship  in  which  natural  products 
were  to  represent  the  world,  and  a  flame  burning  over  these 
to  symbolise  the  aspirations  of  man's  heart.  A  handsome 


GEORGE  SAND'S  CHILDHOOD.  513 

pyramid-shaped  music-stand  was  chosen  for  altar,  and  on  the 
shelves  of  this  the  successive  stages  in  the  evolution  of  Nature 
were  to  be  indicated.  The  rite  was  to  be  carried  out  at  sun- 
rise, the  altar-flame  to  be  secured  by  means  of  fumigating 
pastils  and  a  burning-glass.  The  first  performance  was  a 
success,  but  in  trying  to  repeat  it  the  boy-priest  omitted  to  put 
the  pastils  into  a  cup,  so  the  lacquered  stand,  with  its  beauti- 
ful gold  flowers,  was  disastrously  burnt — a  contretemps  which 
took  away  all  spirit  for  new  offerings. 

In  comparing  these  two  instances  of  childish  worship,  one 
is  struck  perhaps  more  by  their  contrast  than  by  their  similar- 
ity. Each  of  the  two  incidents  illustrates,  no  doubt,  a  true 
childish  aspiration  towards  the  great  Unseen,  and  also  an 
impulse  to  invent  a  form  of  worship  which  should  har- 
monise with  and  express  the  little  worshipper's  individual 
thoughts.  But  here  the  resemblance  ceases.  The  boy-priest 
felt,  apparently,  nothing  of  the  human  side  of  religion  :  he 
was  the  true  precursor  of  Goethe,  the  large-eyed  man  of  science 
and  the  poet  of  pantheism,  and  found  his  delight  in  symbolising 
the  orderliness  of  Nature's  work  as  a  whole,  and  its  Divine 
purpose  and  control.  Aurore  Dupin,  on  the  other  hand, 
approached  religion  on  the  human  and  emotional  side,  the 
side  which  seems  more  appropriate  to  her  sex.  She  thought  of 
her  deity  as  intently  occupied  with  humanity  and  its  humble 
kinsfolk  in  the  sentient  world  ;  and  she  endowed  him  above  all 
other  qualities  with  generosity  and  pitifulness,  even  to  excess. 
Goethe  seems  to  represent  the  speculative,  Aurore  the  humani- 
tarian, element  in  the  religious  impulse  of  the  child. 

To  follow  Aurore  into  her  later  religious  experiences  in  the 
'  Couvent  des  Anglaises '  would  be  clearly  to  go  beyond  the 
limits  of  these  studies  of  childhood.  I  hope  I  may  have  quoted 
enough  from  the  first  chapters  of  the  autobiography  to  illustrate 
not  only  their  deep  human  and  literary  interest,  but  their  special 
value  to  the  psychological  student. 


33 


BIBLIOGRAPHY. 

(A)  GENERAL  WORKS  ON  CHILD  PSYCHOLOGY. 

D.  Tiedemann,  Memoiren  (memoirs  of  a  two-year-old  son,  the  biologist 
F.  Tiedemann,  b.  1781).  English  Translation :  Record  of  Infant 
Life,  Syracuse,  U.S.A.  French  Translation  by  B.  Perez:  Th. 
Tiedemann  et  la  science  de  P enfant,  1881. 

J.  E.  Lobisch,  Entwicklungsgeschichte  der  Seek  des  Kindes,  1851. 

B.  Sigismund,  Kind  und  Welt,  1856. 

C.  Darwin,  "  Biographical  Sketch  of  an  Infant,"  in  Mind,  vol.  ii.,  1877, 

pp.  285-294. 

B.  Perez,  Les  trois  premieres  annees  de  V  enfant,  1878.     English  Trans- 
lation by  Miss  A.  M.  Christie  (Sonnenschein  &  Co.,  London). 
With  this  should  be  read   the   following   by   the   same  author : 

L' Education  des  le  Ber$eau,  1880 ;  U Enfant  de  trois  a  sept  ans,  1886. 

W.  Preyer,  Die  Seele  des  Kindes,  1882  ;  fourth  edition,  1895.  English 
Translation,  by  H.  W.  Brown,  in  two  parts  (published  by  Appleton 
&  Co.,  of  New  York);  also  selections  from  the  same  under  the 
title  Die  geistige  Entwicklung  in  der  ersten  Kindheit.  English 
Translation  by  H.  W.  Brown  (Appleton  &  Co.). 

F.  Tracy,  The  Psychology  of  Childhood  (Boston,  U.S.,  1893  ;  second 

edition,  1894). 

G.  Compayre,  U  Evolution  intellectuelle  et  morale  de  rEnfant,  1893. 

M.  W.  Shinn,  Notes  on  the  Development  of  a  Child  (Berkeley,  U.S.A., 

1893-94). 

Paola  Lombroso,  Saggi  di  Psicologia  del  Bambino  (Roma,  1894). 
J.  M.  Baldwin,  Mental  Development  in  the  Child  and  the  Race,  1895. 

(B)  SPECIAL  WORKS. 
(i)  IMAGINATION  AND  PLAY. 

J.  Klaiber,  Das  Mdrchen  und  die  kindliche  Phantasie,  1866. 
F.  Queyrat,  L' imagination  et  ses  varietes  chez  VEnfant,  1893. 


516  BIBLIOGRAPHY. 

Reference  may  also  be  made  to  the  works  of  Perez  and  Compayr6 
already  named,  to  Madame  Necker's  ^Education  progressive,  to 
George  Sand's  Histoire  de  ma  vie,  and  to  the  writings  of  Froebel  and 
his  followers  on  the  nature  of  Play. 

(2)  THOUGHTS  AND  REASONINGS. 
E.  Egger,  Observations  et  reflexions  sur  le  developpement  de  V 'intelligence 

et  du  langage  chez  les  enfants,  1881. 

Thoughts  and  Reasonings  of  Children.  Classified  by  H.  W.  Brown. 
Reprinted  from  the  Pedagogical  Seminary,  vol.  ii.,  No.  3  (Wor- 
cester, U.S.A.). 

See  also  the  works  of  Preyer,  Perez,  and  Compayre  mentioned 
above. 

Reference  may  further  be  made  to  the  inquiries  into  the  contents 
of  children's  minds  carried  out  in  Germany  and  elsewhere :  see 
Bartholmai,  "  Psychologische  Statistik,"  in  Stoy's  A  llgem.  Schulzcitung, 
1871 ;  Lange,  "  Der  Vorstellungskreis  unserer  sechsjahrigen  Kleinen," 
in  Stoy's  Allgem.  Schulzeitung,  1879;  Hartmann,  Analyse  des  kind- 
ischen  Gedankenkreises,  2e  auflage,  1890;  Dr.  Stanley  Hall,  'Contents 
of  Children's  Minds,'  Princeton  Review,  New  Series,  vol.  n,  1883,  p. 
249,  and  Pedagogical  Seminary,  vol.  i.,  No.  2. 

(3)  LANGUAGE. 

A.  Keber,  Zur  Philosophic  der  Kindersprache,  1868  ;  2e  Aufgabe,  1890. 
H.  Taine,  "  On  the  Acquisition  of  Language  by  Children,"  Mind,  ii., 

1877,  pp.  252-259. 
Sir  F.  Pollock,  "  An  Infant's  Progress  in  Language,"  Mind,  iii.,  1878, 

pp.  392-401. 

F.  Schultze,  Die  Sprache  des  Kindes,  1880. 
E.  Egger,  Observations  et  reflexions  sur  le  developpement  de  I 'intelligence 

et  du  langage  chez  les  enfants,  1881. 

L.  Treitel,  Ueber  Sprachsturung  und  Sprachentwicklung,  Berlin,  1892. 
H.  Gutzmann,  Des  Kindes  Sprache  und  Sprachfehler,  1894. 
J.    Dewey,    "The    Psychology   of  Infant    Language,"    Psychological 

Review,  1894. 

Other  authorities  on  children's  language  are  quoted  by  Preyer  in 
connexion  with  his  own  full  account  of  the  subject,  Die  Seek  des 
Kindes,  4e  Auflage,  Dritter  Theil,  vi. 

(4)  FEAR. 

Reference  can  be  made  here  to  Locke's  Thoughts  on  Education, 
Rousseau's  Emile,  and  to  the  works  of  Madame  Necker,  George  Sand, 
Preyer,  Perez,  and  Compayre,  already  named. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY.  517 

(5)  MORAL  CHARACTERISTICS. 

These  are  dealt  with  by  Locke.  Rousseau,  Madame  Necker,  by 
Perez  and  Compayre  in  the  works  already  named,  also  by  Perez 
in  his  volume  Le  Caractere  de  Fenfant  a  I'homme,  and  by  most 
writers  on  Education.  The  subject  of  Children's  Lies  is  more 
fully  dealt  with  by  G.  Stanley  Hall,  in  The  American  Journal  of 
Psychology,  vol.  iii.,  i,  and  The  Pedagogical  Seminary,  vol.  i.,  2,  and 
by  G.  Compayr6,  UEvolution  intell.  et  morale  de  r  enfant,  chap.  xiv. 

(6)  ART. 
B.  Perez,  L'art  et  la  poesie  chez  V enfant,  1888. 

(7)  DRAWING. 

Corrado  Ricci,  L'arte  del  Bambini  (Bologna,  1887). 
J.  Passy,  "  Note  sur  les  dessins  d'enfants,"  Revue  Philosophique,  1891. 
Earl  Barnes,  "  A  Study  of  Children's  Drawings,"  Pedagogical  Seminary, 
voL  ii.,  No.  3,  p.  455  ff. 

The  names  of  other  books  on  child-psychology  may  be  found  in 
Tracy's  volume,  The  Psychology  of  Childhood,  p.  162  ff. ;  in  the  Hand- 
book of  the-  Illinois  Society  for  Child  Study,  1895  >  *n  B.  Hartmann's 
article,  "  Alterstypen,"  in  Rein's  Encyclop.  Handbuch  der  Pcidagogik> 
Band  i.,  p.  49;  and  in  C.  Shubert's  Essay,  "Elternfragen,"  in  Rein's 
Aus  dem  piidagog.  Universitdtsseminar  zu  Jena,  1894. 


INDEX. 


Abstraction,  abstract  ideas,  begin- 
nings of,  443  ;  growth  of,  483. 

Acting,  relation  of,  to  play,  36, 
326  ;  as  early  form  of  art,  323  ; 
first  attempts  at,  434,  496.  See 
Dramatic  representation. 

Activity,  action.  See  Move- 
ment. 

Adjectives,  first  use  of,  171,  427. 

Adornment,  child's  instinct  of, 
318.  See  Dress. 

^Esthetic  aspect  of  child,  2  ;  feel- 
ings of  child,  300,  397,  409,  451. 
See  Art. 

Affirmation,  sign  of,  417. 

After-images,  child's  ideas  of,  102, 

465- 

Altruism,  germs  of,  in  child,  242. 
See  Sympathy. 

Amiel,  H.  F.,  3. 

Andree,  R.,  337  note,  338, 345  note, 
348  note,  352  note,  379, 381  note. 

Anger,  early  manifestations  of, 
232,  407,  432. 

Animal,  child  compared  with,  5  ; 
ideas  of  child  respecting,  123; 
dread  of  musical  sounds  by,  195 ; 
fear  of  uncaused  movements  by, 
205,  220 ;  child's  fear  of,  207, 
433  ;  child's  ill-treatment  of, 
239 ;  his  sympathy  with,  247, 
460,  475,  485 ;  recognition  of 
portraits  by,  309 ;  care  of  body 
by,  318;  child's  mode  of  draw- 
ing, 372  ;  his  liking  for,  450. 

Animism,  of  nature-man,  104 ; 
traces  of,  in  child-thought,  480. 

Anthropocentric  ideas  of  child, 
82,  98,  102,  427. 


Anthropomorphic  ideas  of  chil- 
dren, 79. 

Anti-social  tendencies  of  child, 
230. 

Antithesis,  child's  use  of,  174,  429, 
442. 

Argument.     See  Dialectic. 

Arms,  child's  manner  of  drawing, 
348 ;  treatment  of,  in  profile 
representation,  362. 

Art ;  art-impulse  of  child,  298 ; 
first  responses  to  natural  beauty, 
300;  pleasureof lightand colour, 
300 ;  germ  of  aesthetic  feeling 
for  form,  303;  feeling  for  flowers, 
305  ;  feeling  for  scenery,  306 ; 
rudimentary  appreciation  of  art, 
307  ;  effects  of  music,  308 ;  in- 
terpretation of  pictures,  309 ; 
understanding  of  stories,  314; 
realism  of  child,  314;  attitude 
towards  dramatic  spectacle, 
315;  feeling  for  comedy  and 
tragedy,  316  ;  beginnings  of  art- 
production,  318  ;  love  of  adorn- 
ment, 318;  grace  in  action,  321 ; 
relation  of  art  to  play,  321,  326  ; 
germ  of  imitative  art,  323 ;  in- 
vention, 325 ;  roots  of  artistic 
impulse,  327. 

Artfulness  of  children,  272. 

Articulation,  first  rudimentary, 
135 ;  transition  to  true,  138 ; 
defects  of  early,  148,  418  ;  pro- 
cess of,  154;  growth  of,  158, 416, 
427,  439,  467.  See  Language. 

Assertion,  child's  manner  of  mak- 
ing, 457,  471.  See  Sentence. 

Assimilation.     See  Similarity. 
—     phonetic,  156. 

Association  of  ideas,  in  imagina- 


520 


INDEX. 


tive  transformation  of  objects, 
32;  seen  in  extension  of  names, 
164 ;  first  manifestations  of,  405. 
Assonance,  in  early  vocalisation, 
137- 


Baby,  new-born,  helpless  condi- 
tion of,  5,  400. 

Baby-worship,  17. 

Bagehot,  Walter,  280. 

Baldwin,  J.  Mark,  n  note,  20,  40 
note.  335  note,  484  note. 

Barnes,  Earl,  125  note,  224,  368 
note. 

Beard,  drawing  of,  358. 

Beauty.  See  Esthetic  Feeling  and 
Art. 

Binet,  A.,  19,  82. 

Birth,  child's  ideas  of,  i,  107,  117, 
See  Origins. 

Black,  instinctive  dislike  of,  202, 
204,  215,  451,  497. 

Body,  relation  of,  to  self,  no,  113, 
115,  457;  treatment  of,  in  early 
drawings,  344 ;  representation 
of,  in  profile,  362  ;  drawing  of 
animal,  374 ;  first  examination 
of,  403. 

Bridgman,  Laura,  169,  244. 

Bright  objects,  attraction  of,  300, 
403,  409. 

Brown,  H.  W.,  22  note,  74,  95,  97, 
105,  112,  121,  255,  275,  313. 

Burial,  child's  ideas  of,  121  ;  his 
shrinking  from,  478,  486. 

Burnett,  F.  H.,  43,  44,  237,  257. 

Burnham,  W.  H.,  27  note,  30  note. 

C. 

Canton,  W.,  39,  96,  102,  173  note, 
186,  209. 

Catlin,  G.,  356. 

Causation,  cause,  first  inquiries 
into,  78,  446,  457  ;  child's  ideas 
of,  79,  80,  448  ;  effect  and,  con- 
fused, 80,  99,  165. 

Ceremonial  observances  of  child, 
281. 

Champneys,  F.  H.,  196  note,  420 
note. 


Child,  modern  interest  in,  i ;  scien- 
tific inquiry  into,  3 ;  psycho- 
logical investigation  of,  7  ;  rela- 
tion of,  to  race,  8 ;  concern  of 
education  with,  10;  observation 
of,  10 ;  qualifications  for  observ- 
ing, 14  ;  individuality  of,  23. 

Coleridge,  Hartley,  113. 

Colour,  order  of  discrimination  of, 
X9'  437  ;  child's  delight  in,  300; 
preferences  for  certain,  301  ; 
liking  for  contrast  of,  302  ;  first 
observation  of,  422  ;  recognition 
of  affinities  of,  465  ;  recognition 
of  opposition  of,  481. 

Coloured  hearing,  33. 

Comic,  sense  of  the.     See  Fun. 

Commands,  child's  first  use  of, 
172,  430.  See  Law. 

Comparison,  beginnings  of,  71. 

Compayre,  G.,  37  note,  76,  169 
note,  173  note,  208,  217,  249. 

Concretism,  163. 

Contrast,  early  use  of.  See  Anti- 
thesis. 

Contrast  of  colours,  early  percep- 
tion of,  481. 

Conversation,  child's  first  attempt 
at,  431. 

Cooke,  E.,  333  note,  334,  338,  339, 
373.  374  n°te,  375  note,  388. 

Courage,  attempt  to  inculcate,  470. 

Creation.     See  Origin  of  things. 

Cruelty,  towards  children,  226, 
292  ;  nature  of  children's,  239. 

Crying,  of  child  at  birth,  400; 
precedes  smiling,  406. 

Curiosity,  as  characteristic  of 
child,  83 ;  as  counteractive  of 
fear,  225  ;  as  motive  to  maltreat- 
ment of  animals,  241.  See  Ques- 
tioning. 

Custom,  child's  respect  for,  280. 

D. 

Dark,  child's  fear  of,  211,  462. 
Destructiveness,  as  characteristic 

of  child,  240. 
Darwin,  C.,  139, 141,  146,  233  note, 

407  note,  411  note,  417  note. 
Deaf-mutes,  gesture  language  of, 

173,  175- 


INDEX. 


521 


Death,  child's  ideas  respecting, 
120,  463  ;  his  feeling  on  witness- 
ing, 237,  238,  496 ;  dread  of 
losing  mother  by,  245  ;  his 
shrinking  from,  478. 

Defiance.     See  Law. 

De  Quincey,  T.,  251. 

Dialectic,  child's  skill  in,  275,  449, 
460. 

Dickens,  Charles,  53. 

Difference,  dissimilarity,  percep- 
tion of,  67,  441. 

Disappearance,  puzzle  of,  for  the 
child,  84  ;  child's  first  ideas  of, 
444. 

Discipline,  moral,  lying  as  related 
to,  258  ;  resistance  to,  268 ;  criti- 
cism of,  275,  286  ;  child's  imita- 
tion of,  285  ;  problem  of,  290. 

Discrimination.     See  Difference. 

Disobedience,  child's  attitude  of. 
See  Law. 

Distance,  child's  inadequate  ideas 
of,  99  ;  first  perception  of,  414. 

Doll,  place  of,  in  child's  play,  42 ; 
treatment  of,  by  child,  43  ;  illu- 
sion of,  44,  492  ;  fear  of,  204, 
410. 

Domenech,  Abbe,  385  note. 

Dramatic  representation,  effects 
of,  on  child,  315. 

Drawings  of  children ;  general 
characteristics  of,  331  ;  crude 
beginnings  of,  333 ;  first  at- 
tempts at  human  figure,  335  ; 
treatment  of  head,  335  ;  facial 
features,  337 ;  evolution  of 
features,  340 ;  treatment  of  the 
trunk,  344;  of  the  arms,  348;  of  i 
the  hand,  351  ;  of  the  legs,  354  ;  i 
of  the  foot,  355  ;  introduction 
of  profile  elements,  356  ;  mixed 
schemes  of  human  figure,  367  ; 
representation  of  action,  369 ; 
treatment  of  accessories,  370  ; 
of  animals,  372 ;  of  man  on 
horseback,  377  ;  of  man  in  boat, 
house,  etc.,  380  ;  of  house,  381 ; 
resume  of  facts,  382  ;  defects  of, 
382  ;  showing  what  is  invisible, 
383,  392  ;  explanation  of  facts, 
385 ;  mental  process  involved  in, 
385  ;  child's  observation  as  re-  j 


fleeted  in,  393 ;  his  ideas  of 
objects  as  illustrated  in,  394 ; 
rudiments  of  artistic  value  in, 

396- 
Dreams,  child's  first  ideas  of,  103  ; 

as  excitants  of  fear,  218  ;  early 

examples  of,  455,  481,  500,  505, 

506. 
Dress,  child's  dislike  of  new,  202, 

319,  410;  his  treatment  of,  in 

drawings,  371. 
Droz,  G.,  21. 

E. 

Ears,  drawing  of,  343,  361. 

Earth,  the,  child's  ideas  of,  100, 
482. 

Echo,  childish  interpretation  of, 
496. 

Education,  importance  of  child- 
study  for,  10. 

Egger,  E.,  40  note,  47,  107  note, 

153- 

Egoism  of  child.     See  Morality. 
Egyptians,  drawings  of,  361,  366, 

369: 

Emotion.     See  Feelings. 

Envy,  as  childish  characteristic, 
231. 

Erasmus,  D.,  87. 

Evolution,  doctrine  of,  bearing  of, 
on  child-study,  5,  8 ;  on  chil- 
dren's fear,  208  ;  on  their  angry 
outbursts,  234 ;  illustrated  in 
child's  drawings,  382. 

Exaggeration,  child's  tendency  to, 

255- 

Excuses,  child's  invention  of,  271. 

Experiment,  carrying  out  of,  on 
child,  17. 

Expression  of  feeling,  through 
sounds,  136  ;  original  form  of, 
461. 

Eyes,  drawings  of,  340  ;  treatment 
of,  in  profile,  359, 360 ;  treatment 
of  animal,  373  ;  learning  to  con- 
trol movements  of,  401,  402. 

F. 

Fairies,  child's  belief  in,  59,  124, 
454,  466. 


522 


[NDEX. 


Fancy.     See  Imagination. 

Fatalism,  traces  of,  in  child- 
thought,  273. 

Fear,  in  children,  the  observation 
of,     193;     startling    effects    of! 
sounds,   194  ;  feeling  of  bodily 
insecurity,   197 :    of  visible  ob- 
jects,  198 ;    of  strange  things,  | 
199 ;    of  strange    persons,  201,  | 
410;  of  new  clothes,  202,  410;  j 
of  the  sea,  202 ;  of  ugly  dolls,  i 
204,410;  of  moving  things,  205; 
of  shadows,   206  ;    of  animals, 
207,  433  ;  of  the  dark,  211,  462 ; i 
explanation  of,  219;  comparison1 
of  child's  with  animal's,  220; 
with  savage's,  220 ;  with  abnor- 
mal terror,  221  ;  action  of  ex- 
perience upon,  221 ;  palliatives 
of,  223  ;  of  bath,  470  ;  of  lamp, 

493- 
Feelings    of    child,    problem    ofi 

studying,    191 ;    expression    of,  i 

192. 

Flowers,  child's  love  of,  305. 
Folk-etymology,  188. 
Foot,   child's   mode    of  drawing, 

355  »  representation  of,  in  pro- 
file, 364. 
Form,  child's  observation  of,  60, 

393,  421,  465. 
Fry,  I.,  224,  253. 
Fun,  child's   sense    of,   316,  411, 

434.  45°- 

G. 

Galton,  F.,  45,  404. 

Games.     See  Play. 

General  ideas,  generalisation,  first 
rudiments  of,  141,  161 ;  early 
examples  of,  162,  404,  420. 

Gesture,  early  use  of,  as  signs,  138  ; 
of  deaf-mutes,  173,  175. 

Ghosts,  germ  of  fear  of,  in  child, 
462. 

God ;  child's  ideas  of  his  form,  126 ; 
of  his  dwelling-place,  126 ;  of 
his  creative  activity,  127,  478; 
of  his  omniscience,  128;  of  his 
omnipresence,  129;  of  his  good- 
ness, 130;  of  his  eternity,  131 ; 
of  his  triune  being,  331. 


Goethe,  J.  W.  von,  241  note,  315,. 
512. 

Goltz,  B.,  42,  53,  185  note,  186 
note. 

Government.     See  Discipline. 

Grace  of  child,  321. 

Grammatical  forms,  child's  indif- 
ference to,  161,  440. 

Grasping,  movement  of,  412. 

Grave.     See  Burial. 

Greed  of  child,  231,  432. 

Grosse,  E.,  319,  327,  368. 

Growth,  ascribed  by  child  to 
lifeless  things,  97,  449 ;  child's 
inquiries  into.  80,  457  ;  his  ideas 
of,  104.  485 ;  and  subsequent 
shrinkage,  105. 

Guyau,  J.  M.,  253. 

H. 

Habit,  influence  of,  seen  in  chil- 
dren's drawings,  390,  392. 

Hair,  drawing  of,  343. 

Hale,  Horatio,  145. 

Hall,  G.  Stanley,  34,  101,  122,  125, 
135  note,  140,  188,  256,  262,  264 
note,  338  note,  350  note. 

Hallucination,  traces  of,  in  child, 
423.  500,  501,  511. 

Hands,  child's  manner  of  drawing, 
351 ;  first  use  of,  400,  401 ;  dis- 
crimination of  right  and  left, 
484. 

Happiness  of  child,  problem  ofr 
222. 

Harte,  Bret,  65. 

Heaven,  children's  ideas  of,  122, 
126,  479. 

Heavenly  bodies,  children's  ideas 
of,  99,  100,  482. 

Heine,  H.,  3. 

Hell,  child's  fear  of,  224. 

Helpfulness  of  child,  246. 

History,     child's     treatment     ofr 

503- 

Holmes,  Oliver  Wendell,  61. 
Hugo,  Victor,  3,  213. 
Humane  feelings,  compassion  for 

animals,  etc.     See  Sympathy. 
Humorous  aspect  of  child,  3. 
Hypnotic  suggestion,  hypnotism, 

13,  254,  257,  261,  294. 


INDEX. 


523 


I. 


'  I,'  'me,'  first  use  of,  178,  428,  439, 

444- 

Idealism,  traces  of,  in  child,  117. 

Ideas  of  children.  See  Imagina- 
tion and  Thought. 

Illusion,  in  transformation  of 
objects  by  imagination,  31,  500; 
in  play,  47 ;  tendency  to  morbid, 
62. 

Image.     See  Semblance. 

Imagination,  age  of,  25 ;  differences 
in  power  of,  among  children,  26 ; 
transformation  of  objects  of 
sense  by,  29,  500 ;  relation  of. 
to  play,  35 ;  free  projection  of 
images  of,  51 ;  and  Storyland, 
54 ;  connexion  between,  and 
thought,  70 ;  as  element  in  fear, 
218;  relation  of,  to  lying,  254, 
438  ;  early  development  of,  405, 
438.. 

Imitation,  imitative  movement ;  in 
early  language-signs,  142,  147, 
417;  in  early  forms  of  sympathy, 
243,  408 ;  beginnings  of,  322, 

4i5- 

Incantation,  playing  at,  501. 
Indignation,  moral,  manifestations 

of,  in  child,  248,  452,  474. 
Individuality  of  child,  23. 
Ingelow,  Jean,  31,  118. 
Inheritance  of  fear,  208,  411. 
Inquisitiveness.     See  Curiosity. 
Insensibility  of  child,  236. 
Instinct,  in   articulation,   134;   in 

fear,     198 ;    in    angry   passion, 

235 ;    in   truth-telling,   264 ;    in 

respect  for  law,  279. 
Invention,  artistic,  325  ;  practical, 

435  ;     of    language    forms,    see 

Language. 

J- 

Janet,  Pierre,  445. 
K. 

Kipling,  Rudyard,  12. 
Kratz,  H.  E.,  82,  126. 


L. 

La  Fontaine,  J.  de,  239. 

Lamb,  Charles,  213. 

Language,  linguistics  of  child ; 
early  instinctive  sounds,  134, 
416 ;  transition  to  true  speech, 
138;  imitation  of  sounds,  142, 
147,  417 ;  original  inventions 
of  language  signs,  145 ;  trans- 
formation of  our  sounds,  148, 
419 ;  process  of  learning  to 
speak,  154,  160 ;  transposition 
of  sounds  of  words,  155;  redu- 
plication of  sounds,  156  ;  as- 
similation of  sounds, 156;  logical 
side  of  language,  160 ;  first  use 
of  general  signs,  161 ;  spon- 
taneous extension  of  verbal 
signs,  162,  420,  440;  designation 
of  correlative  ideas,  164,  468 ; 
formation  of  compound  names, 
167  ;  other  inventions,  168,  182, 
455)  468  ;  first  sentences,  170, 
420;  inversion  of  order  of  words, 
173  ;  mode  of  expressing  nega- 
tion, 174,  442  ;  early  solecisms, 
176,  440 ;  use  of  pronouns,  '  I,' 
'you,'  178,  444;  trying  to  get 
at  our  meanings,  183 ;  word- 
play, 187;  stickling  for  accuracy 
of  words,  189,  466. 

Laughter.     See  Fun. 

Law,  early  struggles  with,  267, 
451;  devices  for  evading,  270; 
instinctive  respect  for,  277,  434; 
relation  of  custom  to,  280 ; 
child's  spontaneous  extension 
of,  281 ;  his  jealous  insistence 
on,  285 ;  his  voluntary  sub- 
mission to,  287. 

Law-giver,  the  wise,  290. 

Leg,  child's  mode  of  drawing,  354  ; 
representation  of,  in  profile, 
364 ;  treatment  of  animal's, 

375- 

Liberty,  respect  for,  in  moral  train- 
ing, 296  ;  child's  love  of,  473. 

Lies,  lying,  viewed  as  character- 
istic of  child,  251  ;  early  forms 
of,  252,  432,  438 ;  permanent, 
260 ;  contagiousness  of,  261 ; 
shrinking  from,  261. 


524 


INDEX. 


Likeness.  See  Portrait  and  Simi- 
larity. 

Locke,  John,  g,  34,  213,  218. 

Lombroso,  P.,  ng  note,  166  note, 
169,  255  note,  271  note. 

Loti,  Pierre,  203. 

Lubbock,  Sir  John,  45. 


M. 

Maillet,  E.,  173. 

Make-believe,  as  characteristic  of 
child,  38,  434.  See  Play  and 
Acting. 

Man,  first  drawings  of,  335 ;  first 
use  of  name,  425 ;  theory  of 
creation  of,  478. 

Marshall,  H.  Rutgers,  327  note. 

Maspero,  G.,  36g  note. 

Materialism  of  child,  125,  507. 

Memory,  of  our  early  experiences, 
15  ;  of  words  of  story,  57,  466; 
tenacity  of  children's,  6g ;  illu- 
sion of,  258  ;  beginnings  of  per- 
manent, 437,  481. 

Metaphor,  in  children's  use  of 
language,  163,  175,  426,  442, 

455,  483- 
Metathesis,  155. 
Minto,  W.,  164. 
Mirror-reflexions,    as     aiding     in 

growth  of  self-knowledge,  112; 

understanding  of,  3og. 
Moral    depravity,  doctrine  of,   i, 

22g. 
Morality    of    child,    question    of, 

228  ;  anti-social  tendencies,  230, 

473  ;  altruistic  tendencies,  242  ; 

lying,  251 ;  summary  of  moral 

traits,  265. 

Motet,  A.  A.,  261  note. 
Mother,  child's  love  of,  243,  245, 

4g8  ;  first  recognition  of,  404. 
Mouth,  modes  of  drawing,  340  ; 

carrying  objects  to,  401,  415; 

use  of,  in  turning  key,  435. 
Movement,  as  sign  of  life,  g6. 
Movements,  muscular,  in  early 

attempts    to    draw,    333 ;    first 

aimless,  412 ;   early  purposive, 

412. 
Miiller,  F.  Max,  147  note,  177. 


Multitude  of  things,  child's  per- 
plexity at,  84. 

Music,  musical  sounds,  discon- 
certing effect  of,  ig5,  4og  ; 
enjoyment  of,  308,  4g2. 

Myth,  child's  belief  in,  5g.  See 
Story. 

N. 

Names,  asking  for,  77.  See 
Language. 

Natural  phenomena,  nature  ; 
child's  ideas  of,  go,  46g,  482  ; 
early  aesthetic  feeling  for,  306. 

Neck,  drawing  of,  346. 

Negation,  early  verbal  forms  of, 
174,  442  ;  early  gesture  for,  417. 

Neophobia,  221. 

Nervous  system  of  child,  imper- 
fect development  of,  61  ;  sounds 
as  disturbing  shock  to,  ig5,  igy. 

Noiree,  L.,  144  note. 

Nose,  modes  of  drawing,  341,  357. 

Novelty,  effect  of,  on  children's 
feeling,  igg,  4og,  410. 

Number,  disregard  of,  in  drawing, 
352  ;  first  ideas  of,  456  ;  growth 
of  clearer  ideas  of,  468,  484. 

O. 

Obedience  and  disobedience  of 
children,  267.  See  Law. 

Observation,  of  children's  minds, 
10;  characteristics  of  children's, 
66 ;  selectiveness  of,  67 ;  de- 
fects of,  in  children,  3g3  ;  early 
examples  of,  402,  452,  464,  465, 
480. 

Onomatopoetic  sounds,  in  chil- 
dren's language,  143,  418. 

Origin  of  things,  child's  inquiries 
into,  yg,  85,  446,  483,  485 ;  his 
theories  respecting,  107,  478. 

Ornament.     See  Adornment. 

P. 

Passy,  J.,  33g  note,  361,  368. 
Payn,  James,  12  note,  185, 215  note. 
Peasants,  association  with,  504. 
Perez,    Bernard,    106    note,    ig3 


IXDKX. 


525 


note,  195  note,   199  note,  232, 1 
241,    252,    260    note,    298,   305 ! 
note,    306,    315,   320,   337,    341,  | 
417  note. 
Perplexity,  child's  feeling  of,  83, 

463- 

Personal  identity,  altered  person- 
ality; child's  notions  respecting, 
116,  445,  461 

Personification.     See  Vivification. 

Pestalozzi,  J.  H.,  47. 

Petrie,  W.  M.  F.,  310, 311  note,  366 
note. 

Photographs,  child's  feeling  about, 
461. 

Pictures,  treatment  of,  by  child, 
50;  dislike  of  cruel,  250 ;  inter- 
pretation of,  309. 

Pitt-Rivers,  A.,  General,  336,  340 
note,  344,  355,  356,  359,  360, 
366,  368,  371. 

Pity,  for  animals.     See  Sympathy. 

Play,  and  imaginative  realisation, 
35,  438,  494,  501 ;  imitative,  37  ; 
as  acting  a  part,  38  ;  part  of  sur- 
roundings in,  39  ;  solitary,  40 ; 
with  toys,  42 ;  illusion  of,  47 ; 
relation  of,  to  art,  321. 

Please,  wish  to,  as  social  tendency 
in  child,  246 ;  as  leading  to 
exaggerated  statement,  256. 

Pleasure  and  pain,  instinctive 
expression  of,  191 ;  action  of, 
as  motives,  415. 

Pollock,  Sir  F.,  172,  173,  174,  175. 

Portrait,  dog's  fear  of,  220 ;  re- 
cognition of,  309.  See  Photo- 
graphs. 

Position,  of  pictures,  child's  in- 
difference to,  310;  his  neglect 
of  relative,  in  drawing,  338. 

Postgate,  J.  P.,  149  note,  157  note. 

Power,  love  of,  as  element  in 
childish  cruelty,  240. 

Prayer,  child's  manner  of,  127, 
130,  283,  477,  486. 

Prevarication.     See  Lies. 

Preyer,  W.,  19,  no,  113,  135,  136, 
140,  141  note,  142,  143,  145, 
148  note,  152,  153,  155,  159, 
160  note,  162,  165,  169,  171 
note,  172,  177  note,  179,  181, 
182  note,  191,  195,  196,  198 


note,  201,  202,  208,  210,  233, 
285,  301,  333,  335  note,  414 
note,  417  note. 

Priggishness  of  child,  286,  471. 

Profile,  child's  manner  of  draw- 
ing, 356,  384,  392,  394- 

Pronouns,  first  use  of,  178,  440. 

Proportion,  defective  perception 
of,  304 ;  want  of,  in  early  draw- 
ings, 339,  34&>  38i,  383- 

Psychology,  importance  of  child 
for,  7. 

Punishment,  child's  protests 
against,  276 ;  his  insistence  on 
undergoing,  288;  self-infliction 
of,  289. 

Punning,  187. 

Purpose,  child's  projection  of  idea 
of,  81.  See  Cause. 

Q. 

Queyrat,  F.,  27. 

Questioning,  children's,  date  of 
first,  75  ;  significance  of,  75 ; 
various  directions  of,  76 ;  as  to 
reasons  and  causes,  77,  447, 
457 ;  rage  of,  83,  446 ;  about 
origins,  85,  485 ;  metaphysical 
direction  of,  87  ;  about  nature's 
processes,  87 ;  how  to  deal  with, 
89. 

Quinet,  Edgar,  57. 

R. 

Reaching    out    to    objects.      See 

Grasping. 

Realism,  aesthetic,  of  child,  314. 
Reason,  reasoning,  the  dawn  of, 

64  ;    early    practical    form    of, 

71 ;    seen    in   comparison,    71 ; 

in    discovering    connexions    of 

things,  73  ;  child's  manner  of, 

80,  93,  448,  458,  459,  469,  470 ; 

growth  of  power  of,  447,  459. 
Rebelliousness  of  child,  269,  452. 

See  Law. 
Recognition  of  objects,  beginnings 

of,  68,  404;  of  pictures,  309. 
Reduplication  of  sounds,  137,  156. 
Reflexions,    early     attention     to, 

405,  406.     See  Mirror. 


526 


INDEX. 


Religion,    child's    experience    of, 

506  ;  invention  of,  510. 
Remorse    after   lying,  262 ;    after 

disobedience,    278 ;    nature    of 

child's,  477. 

Rhyme,  child's  feeling  for,  451. 
Rhythm,  child's  feeling  for,  308. 
Ricci,  Corrado,  335,  360  note,  363 

note,  369,  379  note,  380. 
Robinson,  Dr.  Lionel,  17. 
Romancings.     See  Story. 
Romanes,    G.   J.,    139    note,    164 

note,  220. 
Rousseau,  J.  J.,  i,  214,  218,  228, 

272. 

Rules.     See  Law. 
Ruskin,  J.,  25,  32,  41,  241   note, 

247. 


S. 


Sand,  George,  43,  109,  113,  223; 
childhood  of,  489. 

Savage,  his  fondness  for  toys,  45 ; 
names  of,  168 ;  aesthetic  taste 
of,  306,  307  ;  adornment  of,  318  ; 
drawings  of,  331  note,  332,  336, 
337»  338,  340,  344.  345  note,  346 
note,  348,  349,  352,  353,  355,  356, 
358  note,  359,  361,  365,  366,  368, 
371'  372,  373,  374  n»te,  377,  379, 
381. 

Schoolcraft,  H.  R.,  337  note,  344, 
352  note,  369  note,  373  note, 
374  note,  379. 

Schultze,  F.,  153. 

Science  and  childhood,  3. 

Scott,  Sir  Walter,  196. 

Sea,  curiosity  respecting,  83 ; 
child's  first  impression  of,  202, 

433- 

Secrets,  secreting  objects,  252. 

Self,  child's  first  ideas  about,  109, 
113,  457  ;  consciousness  of,  114, 
426 ;  way  of  speaking  of,  178, 

444- 
Self-feeling,  as  element  in  child's 

anger,  235,  471. 

Self-restraint,  germ  of,  288,  436. 
Self-will  in  child,  451.     See  Law. 
Semblance,  child's  production  of, 

323  ;     his     understanding     of, 


Sensation,  attribution  of,  to 
objects,  449.  See  Vivification. 

Sensibility,  sensitiveness,  of  child, 
191. 

Sentence,  first  formation  of,  171, 
420 ;  growth  of,  430,  440. 

Sentence-words,  171. 

Shadows,  child's  ideas  of,  113 ; 
his  fear  of,  206. 

Shinn,  M.  W.,  18  note,  86,  129, 
r73>  r96J  221  note,  239,  301,  302, 
308,  309,  310,  311,  312. 

Shrinkage,  ascribed    by  child   to 
inanimate  objects,  97 ;    child's 
ideas  of,  in  old  age,  105. 
;  Shyness,  child's  feeling  of,  450. 
]  Sigismund,  B.,  4. 

Sight,  sense  of,  first  exercises  of, 
401,  404. 

Sign-making,  as  spontaneous  im- 
pulses in  child,  138,  431.  See 
Gesture  and  Language. 

Sikorski,  Dr.,  213. 

Similarity,  child's  feeling  for,  33  ; 
play  of,  seen  in  extension  of 
names,  162,  426 ;  early  percep- 
tion of,  72,  441. 

Sky,  children's  ideas  of  distance 
of,  99  ;  their  conception  of  form 
of,  100. 

Smile,  first  appearance  of,  n, 
401  ;  growth  of,  407. 

Sociability,  social  feelings,  germs 
of,    in     child,    242,    433.       See 
Sympathy. 
'  Soul,  child's  idea  of.    See  Animism. 

Sounds,  as  sign  of  life,  97  ;  early 
spontaneous,  134;  fear  of,  194, 
409.  See  Articulation. 

Space,  first  perceptions  of,  4. 
i  Speech.     See  Language. 

Spencer,  Herbert,  125. 

Steinen,  Karl  von  den,  331  note, 
336  note,  338,  345,  348  note, 
352  note,  355,  371,  372,  379. 

Stephen,  Leslie,  307  note. 
'  Stevens,  E.  M.,  81  note,  124,  212. 

Stevenson,  R.  L.,  36,  39,  95  note, 

206,  214,  225  note,  323,  326. 
!  Story,  as  stimulus  to  imagination, 
54 ;    child's    respect   for   exact 
words  of,  57 ;  acting  out  of,  in 
play,    58 ;     early    attempts    at 


INDEX. 


527 


invention  of,  59,  328,  453,  467, 
494;  understanding  of,  314. 

Strangers,  child's  fear  of,  201,  410. 

Substantive,  first  use  of,  170.  See 
Language. 

Subterfuges  of  children,  262,  271, 

451- 
Supernatural,    the,    child's    ideas 

of,  124;  fear  of,  212,  491,  505. 

See  Fairies. 
Symbolism,  in  art  representation, 

325,  336,  383.  399- 

Sympathy,  as  qualification  of  the 
child-observer,  14  ;  with  in- 
animate objects,  30 ;  lack  of, 
in  children,  236 ;  early  forms 
of,  243,  408,  433 ;  beginnings 
of  genuine,  244,  451,  474;  with 
animals,  247,  467,  475,  485; 
with  toys,  etc.,  249. 

Sweet,  H.,  155  note. 

T. 

Taine,  H.,  141,  142. 

Teasing,  as  characteristic  of  child, 
242. 

Tender  emotion,  450,  461. 

Terrifying  children,  226. 

Thackeray,  W.  M.,  56. 

Theological  ideas,  120.     See  God. 

Thought  of  children,  the  process 
of,  64;  products  of,  91  ;  ten- 
dency to  system  in,  91  ;  com- 
pared with  thought  of  primitive 
man,  92  ;  modus  operandi  of,  93. 

Thunder,  child's  ideas  of,  101 ;  his 
fear  of,  196,  433. 

Tiedemann,  D.,  140. 

Time,  first  notions  of,   119,  429, 

443,  455- 
Tolstoi,  Count  L.,  192  note,  238 

note. 
Touch,    first    sensations  of,  400 ; 

examination  of  things  by,  403. 


Toys,  imaginative  transformation 
of,  42 ;  affection  lavished  on, 
249.  See  Doll  and  Play. 

Tracy,  F.,  148  note,  205  note,  405 
note. 

Training,  moral,  wrong  and  right 
methods  of,  291.  See  Discipline. 

Trunk.     See  Body. 

Truth,  child's  instinctive  respect 
for,  264,  476.  See  Lies. 

Tylor,  E.  B.,  168  note. 

U. 

Unseen,  as  field  for  imagination, 

52- 
Untruth.     See  Lies. 

V. 

Vanity  of  child,  320,  471. 
Veracity.     See  Truth  and  Lies. 
Verb,  first  use  of,  176,  429. 
Verse,    child's    feeling    for,    308, 
491 ;  his  early  attempts  at,  329. 
Vivification,  of  lifeless  objects,  30, 
'  96,  459 ;  of  toys,  46. 

W. 

Will,  first  manifestation  of,  412. 
Wiltshire,  S.  E.,  258,  262. 
Wind,    children's    ideas    of,    95 ; 

dislike  of,  409. 
Women  as  observers  of  children's 

minds,  18. 
Wonder,  child's  tendency  to,  77  ; 

early  manifestations  of,  408, 462. 
Worcester  Collection  of  Thoughts 

and    Reasonings    of   Children. 

See  Brown,  H.  W. 
Words,     power     of,     on     child's 

imagination,     54;      scrupulous 

regard  for,  in  stories,  57.     See 

Language. 
Writing,  invention  of,  503. 


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